


The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot

by jamnesias



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boats and Ships, Explicit Sexual Content, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Morbid, Original Character(s), Pirates, Terminal Illnesses, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:53:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 53,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamnesias/pseuds/jamnesias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lust, love, blood, gold, legends.</p><p>James and Jack's lovestory. AU from the first film. James has Tuberculosis. In one timeline, James takes one of the cursed coins to save himself. In another, he doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written before and ignoring anything after and including PoTC2. I started this fic when I was 17 and finished it many years later. It's still the longest thing I've ever written, and probably that which I am most proud of, even though I haven't re-read it all for a very, very long time and am sure I would cringe if I did.
> 
> I am way out of the Pirates fandom now, I haven't even watched the third film completely, but this captures those early days, that time when the PoTC fandom was genuinely the best place on the internet <3 I'm resisting the urge to edit it, and leaving it as it is. I am old and contrary.
> 
> Years and years later, this is still dedicated to my amazing beta Linaelyn. A wonderful woman.
> 
> Also, the timeline jumps around a lot in this first section. Pre-warning!

 

_ Our little secret just might be the kind of thing that you can’t hide  
It’s growing like a tangled vine and rising like a river in the tide _

_ [Act Naturally, Semisonic] _

  
  
  
  
**me? i’m dishonest**  
  
James hides a lot within the layers of his bright uniform, but he can’t disguise the drop of blood on his cravat. Jack spots it as he’s picking apart the white folds with eager fingers, pressing his lips to the throat revealed and arching into the hand working its way up his spine. He can tell, pausing to frown at the spill, that it must have dripped off James’s pale chin – and he grins with sudden understanding, pressing a finger to the red and then walking two up over his own damp mouth marks to look for the hidden shaving cut on the underside of the jaw. A little nick he can poke fun at.   
  
But the skin is all as flawless as always, clear and smooth.  
  
James’s expression, isn’t.  
  
  
  
  
 **not all treasure [is silver and gold]**  
  
There’s something...else to this man. Jack’s only met him - what, eight times now?, and seven of them he had either (or both) Elizabeth or dear William with him but  _this_  time it’s just Norrington and old Jack, (and, right, all the other Navy blokes slipping amongst the crowd but Jack is with  _him_ ) and he is finding that he wants to tilt his head even more than during the others.  
  
One reason’d have to be that the Commodore’s got this way of looking and standing at Jack so tall and straight it makes Jack want to cock sideways just to annoy him. Show him that he can. And aye, that was standing  _at_  – this one makes stillness a gesture, a way of conveying (or hiding) his thoughts and personality as much as Jack does with his hands.   
  
The other reason, though, is the temptation to let a little of his hair fall across his face; use his metal pendant to dazzle Norrington in the setting sun and make him blink, maybe let Jack get a bit of protection behind some of the locks ‘cause blimey, man’s got a piercing gaze. It’s not even shaded, since he’s not wearing that hat (or his uniform, clever Navy buggers), and Jack isn’t used to anyone who doesn’t get distracted by his hands and movement, the stories on his skin and in his hair.  
  
And just to add the niggle he’s getting, taking root somewhere in his right shoulder, he is finding it the kind of gaze that he would like to take the time to stare back at. There’s a challenge he is itching to meet there. Still, over.   
  
But no – focused now, is Jack. No-one’ll even get the  _chance_  to try and get one over him again.   
  
“Fancy meetin’ you here,” he says, leaning back against the dusty wall behind him. Cuba’s pretty, but it doesn’t half make you cough.  
  
Norrington sheathes his sword. Confidence in the situation, ease. “You can hardly be surprised,” he says. “I wasn’t simply going to forget you for the rest of my career.”  
  
But he is.   
  
Fellow looks  _good_  without his wig.  
  
  
  
  
  
 **the opportune moment**  
  
He’s dying, then. Jack supposes it’s just suitable for that tragic overlooked hero role he’s got going. But to develop it after nearly nine years  _here_ , to boot – well that’s just dog’s luck, that is.   
  
And even though everyone already railed about him serving as Commodore by thirty, Jack felt James L. had a lot of potential still. Lot of missed opportunity, there. Or something.   
  
So this’d be the moment to slip away, then. James’ll understand – he himself said he’ll probably be dead by the next time Jack tips up in Port Royal, after Will and ‘Lizabeth’s wedding or so. And besides, Jack knows that he knows that Jack knows he knows pirates. Whoever falls behind, is left behind. There’s no point getting tangled up in something already heading for the bottom.  
  
Only, he doesn’t know how to say that, and after James has finished telling his tale in that low, quiet voice, it’s he who reties his cravat and leaves. He lifts them stunning eyes from the floor just for a moment, before he turns through the door.   
  
Jack sits down on the little bed they never warmed, sucking one gold tooth in thought, and listens to the footsteps echo dully off along the sodden jetty as Norrington goes back to his own ship.  
  
  
  
  
  
 **no-one, he’s no-one**  
  
It’s the eyes. Got to be. Jack’s always surrounded by blue, his own are brown, so the green is a nice change. And pretty. That’s what it is - he can’t  _help_  it, he’s a pirate.   
  
But truly, it wouldn’t be any sort of pleasure having an(other) ugly enemy, so it’s a blessing Norrington’s a handsome man. Barbossa was a satisfyingly challenging (traitorous, backstabbing, dead as a doorknob  _now_ , bastard) enemy, but not exactly something he enjoyed looking at down his sword. (Though before the curse, he remembers. Thick hair, a strong jaw, eyebrow waggles for ladies in ports. That’d be what greed does, Hector.)   
  
So, these thoughts are understandable. By dwelling a little on the Commodore’s appearance netting his interest whilst he’s locked up in the belly of the  _Dauntless_  again, Jack is merely celebrating that when this latest exploit gets out, and people tell it, the story they weave will be overall more…appealing.   
  
It’s not like he has anyone to talk to, anyway. That evening half his crew had been wandering the town, half settling the  _Pearl_  into her quiet little corner of the bay, and he’d gone for a walk around with Gibbs, picking a couple of lazily unguarded pockets whilst they eyed up the surroundings. They were mainly there to make some repairs, get some provisions – Gibbs had been off searching for his favourite kind of those down one alley near the water front, and Jack wandering the market, when silver and green had flashed in the widening dark eyes of the old woman sitting in front of him at her table of beads and cloth, and he’d whirled to find Norrington calmly holding his sword up, the point level with Jack’s throat.  
  
There's silver now and all – a few chinks of the morning light streaming in some tiny gaps between the ship’s boards, thin shafts going at different angles over his head and through his legs to highlight the bars. Just to re-iterate where he is, in case he missed that. Lovely. Ta.  
  
Ah,  _well_. It could be worse. The Commodore might have got the Captain, but he didn’t get the ship. Jack smirks, remembering gesturing as he was marched through stalls (jewellery, scarves, sculptures, fresh made bread, a collection of chickens Norrington had hopped rather neatly over) past the slender shoulders to Gibbs to collect the crew and bugger off back to the  _Pearl_ , get her out and off to freedom. Gibbs had actually dropped the barrel he was holding to do it, sending it rolling into the chickens, and the confusion  _that_  had caused had been more than enough to match the looks on all them Navy faces when his girl suddenly appeared, slipping past them and out of range with a sigh.  
  
So the  _Pearl_  is free, and here he is. And, barring the obvious, he’s...alright, so he has this one other dilemma.   
  
The man himself.   
  
Norrington.  
  
Jack sighs, putting his arms through two of the holes between the cross bars, resting his forearms on the horizontal parts and his chin on another. Bloody Christ, Norrington could well have been one of the loveliest looking things in the Continent (a title most would likely give to Will, what with his father’s doe eyes), or the best fighter, or card player, even, but still Jack might have found him ultimately as boring as his Aunt Fanny – yet (and he’s just doing it to be annoying, Jack’s sure), he’s not. Forget the pleasant arrangement of the face and his lean body, his mouth’ll quirk into stabbing wit, he’s got little interesting layers underneath that crop up every now and then, and what is practically an inability to stop his thoughts running across his face but the stubbornness to try. Attempt the impossible.   
  
More often than not, he probably succeeds, too.   
  
Impressive man. That’d be another reason for the head cocking; Jack  _likes_  considering this one. Fact that he has to, as well, is nice. And he gets all that concentration back and all.   
  
It’s...aye, definitely the best kind of enemy.   
  
But, Jack wonders, as said enemy comes down the stairs to the brig and stands stiffly the other side of the bars with one arm behind his back, if you opened him up, what you’d find.   
  
A sponge, he thinks. Squeezed, bone dry.  
  
“Sparrow. Since your crew managed to resist capture by my men–”  
  
“Ah, how is that one I saw being helped in? Anamaria has got  _devilishly_  bony knees, hasn’t she?”   
  
Norrington continues unaffected, though he takes one second to simply  _look_  at Jack, “–and slip the  _Black Pearl_  away whilst I was bringing you on board, you will tell me where they took your ship, and how many sail her. Scattered reports say roughly twenty seven. Are they on the mark?”  
  
Jack frowns, shaking a lock of hair from his face and hooking a hand up to stroke his chin over the bar. Bloke needs a good, wet wake up. A dunking of some kind. And...well, when you think about it (as he does, crooking his finger and beckoning the Commodore in) there’s got to be none better to do so than someone who can taste sea water when he sneezes. He’s just doing his...civic duty. (Even if he isn’t actually a resident of any town.)   
  
“Without mentioning the fact that I see no reason t’help you, since you’ll be hangin’ me either way,” he answers, “how ‘bout you tell me something about yourself first, Commodore?”  
  
Norrington does that fake smile he’s so fond of. “What a scintillating idea.”  
  
“Oh go on.”  
  
“ _No_ , Sparrow.”  
  
“Well that’s the thing, y’see.” Jack shrugs, then sits down, leaning back on his elbows and looking up at the man. “Either you tell me somethin’ an’ then I tell you somethin’ in return, or else it’s just gonna be a long journey of me sayin’ nothing at all, savvy?”  
  
Norrington narrows his eyes. “Why are you interested?”  
  
“Just a gentleman’s curiosity.” Eyelids go lower, an eyebrow up. He ignores the silent scoff, and continues. “I mean, I know what  _you_  are,” he flicks his fingers towards the Commodore, “you know what  _I_  am...” - then back to himself, “...now don’t you think we should actually get t’ _know_  each other a bit?”  
  
“To what  _possible_  end?” Norrington asks. He looks sceptical, but Jack can spot genuine confusion in there too. Likely most so far have gone for that spitting in his face route.   
  
“Sworn enemies should know everything about each other,” Jack answers. It’s true. “Otherwise how can they truly call themselves committed to the cause?” A snort. “B’sides, can’t argue this kind of thing doesn’t please all the story tellers, too.”  
  
“And what story are they telling?”  
  
He leans in. “The one we’re part of, Commodore – the tale o’  _Captain Jack Sparrow_  and his daring exploits on the ocean, an’ the upstandin’, gallant man who’s trying t’stop him.”   
  
Sighing, Norrington just asks, “Is everything a part of some dramatic scene to you, Sparrow? Another part for your legend?”  
  
Jack pauses, and shrugs very slightly, but doesn’t look away. “It’s not like you can escape it, in this game. I try to have fun with it, if I can. N’ you can hardly look down on it, oh  _infamous_  Pirate Catcher Norrington.”  
  
Norrington purses his lips, looking away a moment in thought. “…What sort of things would you want to know?”  
  
“The inbetweens, mate.  _Details_.” He sits up even straighter, crossing one leg into his lap. “Now I’ve got the bigger picture already – who could miss you, really, in that hat – but I want some different things. Like where you got that ear done, for a start.”   
  
The Commodore  _doesn’t_  start, but turns back, reaching up to the little hole in his left earlobe and smoothing his finger and thumb over it. His lips tilt into an expression that looks both intrigued, and annoyed.  
  
“Very few people notice that,” he says, slowly.   
  
“Aye, well that’ll be because most people’re probably too busy shrinking under that Look. Or being blinded by your brocade.”  
  
Norrington snorts again, once. Jack grins. “Come on, mate,” he presses, “Aren’t you just a  _little_  bit curious?”  
  
“Oh, there’s  _plenty_  enough told about you for one to never have to spend much time wondering even if they would,” Norrington replies, dryly.   
  
“Ah, but I’ll only tell you truths. So long as y’do the same, o’course.” He must be getting somewhere. Commodore’s gone all tense. “You’ll get nothing otherwise,” he adds, trying to nudge things just that last bit...   
  
Bad move. Norrington looses all traces of amusement. “I’ll not have you trying to run rings around  _me_ , Sparrow. Remember where you are.”   
  
He moves back, hands up. Right, bit  _too_  far, there.   
  
“Tread. carefully. I don’t need to be down here, I’m well within my prerogative to have you in irons and leave you here alone until we get back to Port Royal.”  
  
He knows that one’s correct. Nods. “Alright – I’m not trying to trick you, Commodore. I’m just trying t’save meself – us  _both_ , from being bored silly all the way.”  
  
Norrington considers Jack for a moment more. Jack tries not to move. The ship tips, slightly - the  _Dauntless_  testing them out. With the slight change of angle the lantern ever so kindly left in his cell splutters, gasping out some light: it mingles on the bars and makes silvergold swirl on the floor between them.  
  
Jack doesn’t look down. Neither does Norrington. And with the next tip back he is smartly turning, taking hold of one of the barrels standing by the wall opposite the cell that have been teasing Jack with the possibilities of what might be in them. He drags it up, brushes the lid off and sits on it in front of the bars, folding his arms and crossing his legs. “Fine. What do you want to know?”  
  
Jack leans in immediately, clapping his hands together and rubbing them. “What’s your name?”  
  
Norrington’s expression tightens. “Wrong question.”  
  
“Oh go on. Please?”  
  
Norrington opens his mouth, and then shuts it again. Sighing again, he looks to the low ceiling. “James. My name is James,” he says.  
  
A slow smile. “Right. Ta.”   
  
“Mmn.”  
  
“Though I, o’course, knew that already.”  
  
Norrington stares at him. “Then why on  _earth_  did you ask?”  
  
He smiles quietly. “I don’t go by the earth, James, you might want to re-phrase that.”  
  
 _James’s_  lip curls into the beginnings of a snarl.  
  
“Oh now keep that carefully crafted resolve, I’m getting there.” He chuckles. “’s polite, isn’t it? Now I can actually call you that, since you told me.”  
  
He gets a sceptical huff in response. “I  _hardly_  take you for one to be much enamoured with social niceties.”  
  
“Shows what you know, then.” He clears his throat and straightens his hat. “Okay. Where to start?... Ah! Once upon a time...” Norrington rolls his lovely eyes, “...there was a pirate. This pirate had black, black hair, black as old boots, but his ship – now  _she_  was even darker. He-”  
  
“Where did you get her?” Norrington interrupts.  
  
He clacks his mouth shut. Tuts. “Wrong question, mate. …Without the proper motivation, anyway.”  
  
Norrington raises a dark eyebrow, and taps his polished heel against the barrel he’s sitting on. The sound echoes out in ripples. There’s liquid inside, sloshing.   
  
The back of Jack’s tongue quivers. Norrington smiles triumphantly. “How’s this for motivation?”  
  
Jack finds his head cocking before he knows it, and tries not to laugh, but does, amused.  
  
As he’d thought.   
  
Interesting man.   
  
  
  
  
  
 **something...really...stupid**  
  
When the ship comes into view, Jack stops, kicking water for a second.   
  
Oh he knows this is a bad idea. It’s not as though Will didn’t have a point.   
  
That’s not going to stop him though.   
  
He shakes his hair from where it is wrapping around his throat, adjusts his hat, and keeps going. As with all bad ideas, he thought it through for a while, and still decided to do it.   
  
Taking his time to do so had been a sort of luxury he’s not had much experience of, recently. ...Less you count the feel of a genuine smile you’ve caused stretch-echoed in your chest. But there, that kind of thing; that’s all he’s had since everything is happening so quick. Too quick. He really  _hates_  being rushed. There’s only been five meetings between them, what fits together as barely two weeks of just  _them_ , overall, even though it was spread over eight months. That’s nothing, that’s not enough.   
  
And worst of all, he’s not even sure if it  _was_  James’s beauty that got him first. Which is stupid. Really, really daft. He’s supposed to be a pirate, isn’t he? Yet there he was talking away and somewhere in the middle or near the beginning even, he might just have tilted his head a bit too far and blinded  _himself_. Because...because he thinks perhaps...perhaps even if James  _had_  been as ugly as Barbossa’s crooked smirk, he’d still be here now – heart flipping and rolling like a seabird in the winds.   
  
Bloody hell. Did he think on how this was a stupid idea?   
  
But. But he misses the feel of long calves flexing next to his own (underwater now, leather of his boots rippling like the skin of an otter in the sea) – bloody  _calves_ , what’s that if not ridiculous fixation he thought he’d got past; misses someone who can roll over in bed and throw an arm across his chest, murmuring the wind direction and speed into his neck just from the sound of it outside, and that’s  _better_ than  _he_  can, and blue bejesus but even his gums ache. And so he thinks, you have to know, don’t you?   
  
You should at least make  _sure_.  
  
  
  
  
  
 **take what you can, give nothing back**  
  
Two days and two unexpectedly long conversations later, Jack thinks (been trying to keep count) they’re about equal on stories. He knows where Norrington was born, grew up, the first ship he stood behind the helm of, how many times he’s slipped overboard (not a bad count), and he’s worked out that when his response to something is a snort, it’s because he’s trying to sound derisive but really, he’s amused. Only he knows he shouldn’t be.   
  
He’s refused to tell his middle name, saying giving the entire thing away is unfair when at least Jack’s surname is probably false (he’s spot on, there). Luckily Jack  _has_  worked the initial out of him, and so taken to calling him James L. in gleeful triumph.  
  
In return for these stories, he’s actually told where he got the  _Pearl_ , which only he and her intended owner know. Norrington seems to realise how privileged he is in that, because he looks at the floor. Jack’s told how many she can really carry, how many there  _are_ , but says he doesn’t know where she is. Which is the truth. She could be anywhere. ...In that little area off La Vega he and Gibbs set down for emergencies. Eheh. ‘Hem.   
  
There is a sting in his chest, though, reminding him that they’ll only wait another three days and then Jack’s officially gone according to their code. After that, then more than likely Anamaria’ll take over his _Pearl_ – he does still owe her a ship after all. And annoyingly, the  _Pearl_  seems to like her.   
  
Traitor.  
  
Christ, he misses her again.  
  
He also found out what happened with the ear. “Oh. Uh...half a bottle of brandy, a hot pin, Molly Groves’s earrings, the day before we left for sea, and her smile when I put them all together and suggested it to her brother.”   
  
“...Always doing things for the lady, aren’t you?”   
  
James took a moment to quirk something at him - eyebrow, mouth, it was too quick for Jack to tell and he wanted, suddenly, to make him do it again. “I’ll thank you not to insinuate things about me without knowing the person in question. I  _had_  announced I would marry her when we were eight because of that smile. Got past that when she took to tugging my fringe and calling me Jimlington but nevertheless, I could never be expected to act rationally when she did it. And…she was dying.”  
  
“...Oh.”  
  
“Yes. Happily, I’m sure the memory of Theodore squealing like a stuck pig when I did it to him warmed her when we had gone as much as it still does me, so I never regretted that.”  
  
“Ha! He get his own back?”  
  
“Goodness, no – I wasn’t foolish enough to let him near me. She did it.”  
  
He’s spotted a scar he wants the tale of, on this day; a thin, short line parallel to the veins down Norrington’s right forearm. He came down to the hold just straightening his left sleeve with tense movements, but his right was still pushed up and rolled around the elbow, just above where a short and  _fresh_  gash of red was vivid against the skin. It had drawn Jack’s eyes immediately, and he’d known – a sword. Fencing practise, and recent; Norrington’s face was clearly just washed clean when Jack flicked his eyes up ‘cause he could see the water still shining on the corners of his jaw.   
  
The  _scar_  he saw when Norrington was sat in front of him again, when he decided to ask about the cut. Looking this close again he saw – a faded contrast with the red about the length of his thumb, curving slightly like a whitecap. He was fascinated, suddenly, by the translucence of the skin over the blue, lines coming through like rigging to Norrington’s hand pulling tight as he balled his fist and pointed, insisting (the very first thing to come from his mouth that day), suddenly stern again, that Jack tell him where the  _Pearl_  was.   
  
Jack had had to hook his index finger under his thumb to stop himself trying to reach out and stroke along either the cut or the mark. Norrington probably would have been more shocked at that than he was when Jack replied simply that his form clearly must have been lazy to get a cut that shape, though he reacted well in the end.   
  
Over the time, he’s told bits of his own story too. (“Born in a Spanish palace an’ stolen as a babe by  _dastardly_  pirates, forced into a life of theft an’ debauchery at the point of a cutlass n’ master of me own little boat by my eighth birthday, charming every woman n’ man I met with my cherubic looks.”  
  
“...I rather thought our agreement was the truth, Captain Sparrow.”  
  
“Ah, but that one  _is_  if you’re in Singapore.”)  
  
He told the real truth as well, of course. In fact, rather more than he intended - what with all the rum, and the gesturing, and the little flashes of silver self the Commodore was showing him, he thinks he might just have got a bit carried away. James L. isn’t wearing his hat, and he took his wig off again a little bit ago (Jack thinks he relishes the opportunity to) as well – they’re gestures for Jack as much as himself, but while Jack doesn’t forget it’s a Commodore opposite him, it’s like he’s peeling off the layers himself. ...So to speak.   
  
The cravat has even been loosened. Jack knows enough to know that that’s really something, that the baring of a throat like is meant to be like a surrender.   
  
Though he also knows enough to know there’s no way in hell Norrington’s the surrendering type.   
  
So that means something else. Some kind of... oh Jack doesn’t know, but Norrington is leaning forward with one ankle on the other knee and that dark fringe dropping loose – he’s interested despite himself, and blast but he’s good company, not exactly a chore to look at, and Jack hasn’t seen that fake smile once since yesterday. He can’t stop.   
  
Now of course this doesn’t mean he’s missed that they’re about halfway back to Port Royal, either. But it’s fine, there’s plenty of time. An hour or so more, and he’ll put a plan in action. He is Captain Jack Sparrow, is he not? And truly, hey, if the Commodore had seemed a little reluctant to have the board dropped from his feet that first time it should be even harder now, because as the chuckles rolling from inside him show – seemingly out of the deep blue, they  _get along_.   
  
It’s a turn up for any tide, to be sure. Feels a little bit odd, no questions there, and to be honest it’s probably just a bloody bad idea, but Jack is determined to go with it. If he’s learnt anything, it’s that you should enjoy yourself when you can, damned of the circumstances – and especially if you’re (well, in  _theory_ ) on your way to be killed. People that’ll really make you laugh don’t come up that often.  
  
It  _would_  be easier if he were being treated badly, he thinks, but then he never did pick the easy route. And if it all goes horribly wrong, and he ends up with his boots on a platform and no way out, then if it makes Norrington feel even worse at that second rope dance then  _good_. Even while crediting the Commodore he can still give a savage little last gasp thought. Never could stop that reflexive ‘animal in a corner’ thing he always feels when locked up, with the sea spray too far away.   
  
Only, yet again, problem with that.  
  
It’s as he already thought; he can’t hold up that ideal even to himself, because he’s  _not_  being treated badly, like an animal. Sod it all but he’s being treated  _well_. He even got taken up on deck this morning (hence why he knows almost exactly where they are, since he knows some of the coast around here by sight) by the same proud young man whose voice is currently brushing over his cheekbones like fingers.  
  
These are the kind of things to make a man desperate.  
  
When a couple of hours after Norrington has gone he finally sees that familiar chubby officer posted to his night guard, draws him closer to his cell and thrusts a hand through the bars and yanks him forward, knocking him out on the metal, and uses the bayonet on his musket to pick the lock and get out, it might just be this, too, that makes him stop when he gets out on deck. He pauses with his hands actually  _on_  one of the jollyboats, and looks sideways to the cabin on the poop deck.  
  
It’s also this which lends the unusual tightness to his gait as he slips silently across to it, even though there are still sailors still out on deck. That which whispers he’s got time to get his effects, that they’re probably in that cabin, and when he’s listened for that  _“All clear”_  shout and used it to cover the sound of the door opening it’s this which makes him pause once he has indeed found them in the little room, and stupidly,  _stupidly_  creep over to the man in the hanging cot.   
  
He stands over James and stares, fascinated, at the shadows caused by his eyelashes and the tired circles underneath them; the milky colour of the bare shoulder where the cover has slipped down a little because it’s tangled around his legs; the pool of darkness trickled into and collected in the hollow of his hand curled on the pillow next to his face, that laps back and forth with the slight rolling of the ship. Damp parts of his hair are sticking to his neck. There’s a little mole behind his left ear.   
  
It must be everything altogether that makes Jack lean over and run the backs of his knuckles over that shoulder to gently wake James up. He watches the green eyes blink twice and open, and from so close he swears the iris ripples like he just blew a breath over still water, when he claps his hand over James’s mouth to stop the shout.  
  
He doesn’t know what it is that causes James to make absolutely no move to, though.  
  
Jack feels him swallow, his fingers curled under James's chin, tan against white, and moves his hand away. James just looks up at him, dark and  _pirate_  with his coat pulled back on, gun belt from shoulder to hip again, sword by his side and hat in the same hand. There is no light but an almost finished candle in a lamp on the desk and that coming through the small window, and he knows the moon is catching the metal in his hair, throwing the same pearl into his eyes as he can see in James’s.  
  
“I wondered how long it would take you to think of  _some_  way out,” James says, quite calmly. The pulse in his throat is thumping though, Jack can see it.  
  
He shrugs. He almost feels, ridiculously, that he should apologise. “Y’know me,” he says, lightly.  
  
And realises that’s come to be a little true.  
  
He’s unable to blame the fact that he then bends down halfway through a breath and kisses James on anything but the low tugging in his belly to do it. Both their eyes are open and he sees as well as feels James freeze, and – well, he’s not stupid, he knows that’s it then, he’s done for, especially since the Commodore’s hand is moving and he oh so  _helpfully_  leaned in with a bloody sword all loose in his grip _bugger_  it, not good, not good.   
  
But...right, Christ on a sailing boat at least he’s going with incredibly soft lips on his. That balances things up. James’s hand reaches up, and Jack presses desperately as he shuts his eyes and winces and it— hooks into the lapel of his coat and pulls him down.   
  
Exhaling a shaky breath, James parts his mouth.  
  
Jack closes his eyes and feels his belly kick, kisses with his smile in a rush of relief and lust and surprise and not really, licking across James’s full bottom lip and in. He dapples his fingers down the arched throat and then curls around to cup James’s head, winding fingers into his hair as he sucks a little on James’s tongue, and the Commodore moans softly, flicking it up over his gold teeth. He and James brace against each other, shoulders meeting and there’s a metaphor for their situation there but he’s too busy tasting to dwell on it.   
  
Pulling away. The ache goes across his back like he’s been tugging ropes for too long. Pretty, pretty, shining man. But now is not the moment for this, even if James’s gasping mouth is wet and bruised to watermelon pulp in the moonlight and his eyes the bright colour of the skin (and now Jack  _knows_  he’s in trouble, if he’s thinking of  _fruit_ ), defiant of the nervousness in his hands because of the stronger desire to continue. Jack’s got to come up with something suitably daring and brilliant to befit the situation.  
  
“I’ll be in Tortuga in three days, in the  _Green Mermaid_  on me own,” he finds himself saying. James’s pupils, dilated to big black discs, shrink with the shock. That’ll do then. “If y’fancy ...studying me some more...” James flushes, “—drop by. If you’re not all that interested in this...possible bit of the story, then just...” He runs out of words, stumbling, and straightens, James’s fingers still in his coat. “Well, don’t.”  
  
James doesn’t know his answer yet. Jack looks at him for a second, then steals another kiss in the purely selfless (almost hears James’s snort, there, and thinks he ought to feel it on his top lip, ruffling his moustache) hope of trying to sway him slightly in that decision. Then he breaks away and turns on his heel to cross the room in three fast steps, and disappears out of the door before either one of them starts to completely change their minds.   
  
By the time he’s rowed to land, the sun’s about to come up for the second time. He’s trembling with exhaustion  _and_  he whacks himself in the shin with an oar as he stumbles out of the boat because his knackered fingers drop it, boots scuffing on the stones as he curses. He’s also somehow got to get from there, halfway around the coast to La Vega, within a day.   
  
Luckily, land doesn’t change under you, which is something both boring (not to mention unsettling), and helpful – when you’re a man who can stand on a deck in a storm and not fall over, land holds no fear. He can afford a bit of leisure, too, since nothing followed him.   
  
There’s been a little fissure of hope and expectation growing in his chest to match the amount of sweat running down his back since he left, because of this. James simply must have raised the alarm only after he’d got out of his cot and reported to duty. The fissure is bigger now even than the erection Jack had to take care of at last when he rounded the first cove, for the Commodore must just have gone as though to interrogate the prisoner like each day before. Jack can picture him getting up and gnawing at the corner of his lip, smoothing his hair back to put on his wig and trying to berate himself in his little shaving mirror. It’s not as nice an image as what he might have done with his own arousal, but makes Jack smile nevertheless.  
  
Setting off down a street, he’s overtaken by an ale cart. Either Gibbs is about, or someone’s on his side, because stuff like that can only possibly be going one place. He feels safe enough to catch it, crawl in and sleep – and when he tumbles out again as it crosses the first of the very bumpy and beaten roads of La Vega, he finds his  _Pearl_  still where she should be.   
  
“Jack!”   
  
Gibbs is hanging about the shore and runs up, closely followed by most of the rest of the crew. Overjoyed, he claps a hand on Jack’s shoulder – regrets it, of course, when it comes away damp, but doesn’t hold it against him.   
  
In thanks Jack throws his own hands in the air and gives them all the next few days off in Tortuga. It’s not a hard decision, he  _is_  thankful, but it also means when Sunday rolls around he need not come up with any reason to be in the pub and not out on the water. Not that any pirate would call that a bad idea anyway, but it’s the thought that counts.  
  
And when James L. steps into the pub alone, dressed in simple dark clothing and a hat cocked low but his chin held high, the fissure in Jack’s chest tightens, thumps him excitedly, and breaks into lots of little pieces of sparkling silver and gold, going off down his arms and legs like stars. Something else in there he hadn’t even known was tightened, relaxes.   
  
James side-steps brawls with ease belying the stiffness of his posture and walks over, standing at the edge of the table. Jack smiles slowly up at him, feeling his muscles do the same.   
  
“Drink, mate?” he asks, lifting his tankard. At the gesture Marty and Moises, standing by the door, nod and turn, slipping back into the crowd. He’d told them he was meeting an old friend and to hover by until he turned up, to make sure his agreement hadn’t gone sour and he might need them to run off with the  _Pearl_  again. A just in case, because he’s been tricked enough.   
  
They head towards the rowdiest corner – that’d the one with the most wenches, then. He also put them by the door so that they wouldn’t see James’s face, if he actually came. Wouldn’t have made much difference if he’d turned up with a cavalry, but gave them a sporting chance to beat the crush there would have been, at least. Though it’s unlikely they’d have recognised Norrington, anyway. He really  _does_ look  _delicious_  under all that white hair and brocade, when you take that time to really look at him.  
  
Not that – alright, not that he was exactly bad  _in_  it.  
  
“What d’you say?” Jack continues, waving the tankard about a little.   
  
James takes it from his hand, and slams it on the table. “I’m too bloody nervous to drink,” he hisses, and tugs Jack’s empty hand, pulling him to his feet. Jack stumbles a little, and in helping him James inadvertently brings them closer, chests pressing, tip of James’s nose just bumping the bridge of his because of the height difference. There’s a surprised breath in, possibly from both, and then shaky fingers curl into his coat again. If he’s not mistaken (he’s only had half a pint), there’s a stirring against his hip already, too.   
  
“You’re a scoundrel,” James murmurs, shaking his head.  
  
Jack grins. “Mm.” He twists a wavy lock of that dark hair, fallen free from its tie, around his finger. “But you’re willin’ to overlook it, for a bit.”  
  
James swallows. “You haven’t pulled the wool over my eyes, Jack, I—“  
  
“Wasn’t trying to, love,” Jack interrupts quietly. James smiles a little. “I know. And that’s just it – I’ve  _not_  forgotten anything, but I...I don’t know. I believe I have learnt something, too.”  
  
“By which you mean from all the talking.” Jack smiles back, and even as he strokes a thumb in tiny circles over James’s jaw, cocks his head to ask: “Sure you don’t want a bit more o’that, first, love? Do things proper?”   
  
Rolling his eyes, James starts to push him towards the stairs in the corner. “I think we’ve talked enough,” he growls.   
  
Jack laughs.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 **they’re more like guidelines anyway**  
  
“I am right, aren’t I? That the Bible looks down on this?”  
  
“Mmaarrfsnn.”  
  
“No – Jack, wake up – I mean...the Bible looks down on  _this_.”  
  
Warmth pulled away from his side, suddenly. He blinked open his eyes to see James sitting up, shifting the bed as he turned, folding one long leg under him and looking, indeed, down.   
  
In the single candlelight and starlight bouncing off the water outside that was slipping in under the edge of the curtains, James’s chest and the line of thigh not covered were the brightest things in the room, his skin was that pale. Though, his still loosely tied back hair curled at the tip like a wet paintbrush, and with the window behind him it meant shadows were chucked under his collarbone and the risen scar just over the shoulder joint, bringing them into stark relief. There was incredulity smudged into the little lines between his eyebrows from his frown. Jack thought  _scrimshaw_ , thought that it would leave print on his thumb pads if he smoothed them over the creases, and decided to try it.   
  
After smiling slowly.  
  
Aye, he knew what James was thinking.  
  
The static tickle from the hair on your thighs rubbing against another’s. The taste of salt in the creases of your partner’s eyes. Feel of muscles shifting under your palms, the bumping of your ribs because there’s nothing to stop chest meeting  _chest_ , abrasions and callouses on the hand on your cock.   
  
The sudden and startling appreciation for knuckles.  
  
And, especially for this one, the discovery that the dips which crest over another man’s hipbones are just right to clutch hold of when inside from behind the first time; that when your little low breaths are spelling out  _a h h h, j a— a c k, y o u ... g o d y o u ’ r e s o_  on the back of your new lover’s neck your damp fingers can flutter over, slide along and slip into them if heat and sensation threaten to tip you over.   
  
“It does. Somewhere in there, anyhow. Why?” He scratched his head where the metal pendant was tugging on his scalp a little, then stretched languidly, folding his arms behind his head. “Planning to argue with that God, are you?”   
  
James smiled a little, leaning in to rest his elbow on Jack’s hip and then his chin in his hand. Jack squirmed at the funny point of weight, but happily.  
  
“I just think– stop that,” he was poked most unfairly, “—I just think that it cannot be...well it cannot be entirely sinful, can it?”  
  
Jack lifted an eyebrow, and then his leg, crooking it to knock James down with his ankle. It wasn’t as graceful as he’d hoped – James slipped forward, and his elbow dropping jabbed him in the belly. But, _oof_ ing as it knocked the air out of him, Jack nonetheless had him closer, as he’d planned.  
  
“Oh I like to think it’s just a little bit wicked,” he said in a low voice, running his rough foot down James’s back and over his behind.   
  
Tiny shivers of mirth followed his foot, James arching unconsciously.


	2. Chapter 2

_You are calm and reposed, it lets your beauty unfold  
Pale white like the skin stretched over your bones_

  
  
  
  
  
**silent as the grave**  
  
He is very quiet when he tells it. It’s not the kind of thing one would run around shouting, anyway, even without the matter of whether his lungs could physically take the strain, but there are a couple of moments where he wonders if he hasn’t gone silent and just not realised. He hopes his face remains flat and calm; some kind of suitably sober expression. Thinking about it makes him feel vaguely numb, so it’s not as though he can be entirely sure what his muscles are doing.  
  
Jack isn’t really looking at him anyway, though, so he doesn’t suppose it matters.  
  
  
  
  
  
 **and I half expected it to be made of wood**  
  
“Fence? Now?”  
  
“If you will. I’d like to keep myself in practise; I  _am_  dealing with Jack Sparrow, after all.”  
  
Theodore scratches a thumbnail along his bottom lip, shrugging gently. “Alright. Absolutely. Gets me off deck for a while – Anthony’s in a frightful mood.” He grins easily, relaxing from Lieutenant to friend, and James half smiles back, the familiarity of that gesture and Theodore’s humour working a little to calm him.   
  
Only a little, though. He can still feel the twitching tension turning the tops of his arms to steel, lines wrapped around the tight muscles of his neck. It was as though someone had pulled back on them when he was in the belly of his ship the day before, and out had tipped the words – stories even, and amusement he’d tried to put a stopper on but found he couldn’t. Interrogation had become a conversation, practically, and at some point as he sat on that barrel he became aware he and Sparrow had reached a balance, even with the ship rolling around them.   
  
He feels he is on a see-saw, with the man he’d seen as so very at the other end of the scale sitting cross legged on the opposite side and bringing it level. Even though every turn of his tongue and hands was somehow managing to set everything to rolling along a little more, everything was coming back to...well it was  _fascinating_ , talking with him. Sparrow was as stimulating company as the tales, and James’s until then limited experience of him, had suggested. Clever, sharp, even funny – in a manner totally without decorum or acceptable morals, of course. But James had found himself actually  _enjoying_  it.   
  
How could he have found himself respecting someone of…something he just – a  _pirate_ , he simply…  
  
Which was entirely the reason for this.   
  
He would not be tipped off balance. He  _refused_. This…this  _ache_  starting somewhere near the tops of his thighs would be driven away by some exercise and focus on something other than Jack bloody Sparrow. The bright looks from the pirate were just distractions for when he tried to get his hands into those muscles in James’s neck and  _pull_  – and that would be pull a second time, for it was he who had done it the day before, but James would  _not_  be puppeted by those elegant fingers curving around his shoulders. Dancing and stroking on his skin.   
  
...God- _damn_  it.  
  
He turns on his heel and sets off at a brisk pace to the gun deck, Theodore following. They pause on the way only to collect their swords, then take off their wigs and waistcoats and hook them on exposed nails in the gun deck where they can, to keep them from the gritty dust on the floor.  
  
Rolling up their sleeves and facing each other under the low beams, sword tips crossing lightly in the dusty morning light, they begin.   
  
Theodore immediately goes into the attack; short jabs, sharp strikes and not much time inbetween to evaluate where James might come in return. James is better and they both know it; he easily blocks, then parries with a riposte, knocking Theo’s sword up. In the gap he lunges and –  _gently_  touches the tip of his own to his friend’s shirt clad shoulder.   
  
There. He still has restraint. Take that, Sparrow, with your complete lack of control over yourself and your too easy, rolling movements.   
  
Quite honestly, James thinks to himself, drawing his sword back, he felt the man must have modelled his voice and the sway of his hips on a boat on the swell. The way they  _moved_  was—  
  
Theodore dips his head, grinning light heartedly and stepping back. Pausing, and letting out a slow, angry breath through his nostrils, James set his jaw.   
  
They begin again.   
  
This time the first swipe is from James. Theo blocks it well, and James lifts his eyebrows, impressed. They share a smile – then, over-confident, the Lieutenant takes it as the sign he might best the next. James sidesteps the strike with movements as fast and deft as his wrist and flips his sword to scrape back along the length of Theodore’s.   
  
Theodore takes the hint. He steps back again, wiping an arm over his forehead and pushing his hair back. They circle each other in the grit, both watching for an opening, and yes.  _This_  is better. This he is comfortable with. James knows how he would appear, were someone to look in – now he is the picture of the Commodore, fierce eyes unblinking through his sharp lashes, straight and tall as an arrow with his legs taut all the way from calves to hips and arm extended. And though this is all  _tight_ , he feels... _relax_.   
  
There is nothing but the whip of his sword and the one crossing it, the forearm flexing like his own. From outside, the gentle hiss of the foam on the sea comes in the open window and curls up behind his ears like his wig usually would, and he is focused enough to match every step from the feet a little smaller than his, to see the tiniest movements in the back of Theo’s hand under skin not so light as his own.  
  
But then he is no longer looking, he is staring, because he sees it ripple darker still, stained the colour of the beams crossing near his head. A  _p_  comes through and turns indelible, the burn on top smudged in like chalk, and Theodore steps past the tiny window into shadow and is Jack – tied loose hair to wild black and stockings inverted to supple leather, eyes a swirling black-brown and bright all at once and the recently bared forehead now wrapped in red. His sword hilt flashes like his teeth as he smiles and moves, and James’s eyes widen as he does as well, maybe back, possibly forwards, and—  
  
—pain splits across his arm, just below the elbow.   
  
Gasping aloud, he jerks his arm sideways, dropping the sword such is his surprise. Theodore, following his lunge through, stumbles and pulls up short with a cry.  
  
“Oh!” He drops his sword by choice and turns, taking hold of James’s arm below the cut. “James, I’m sorry!”   
  
James blinks, dumbfounded for a moment. Then the blood wells up and starts to drip thickly round and off of the curve of his arm, and he pulls a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. “It…it’s fine. It doesn’t really hurt.” He wipes the drops away with his other sleeve (ruining the shirt completely, of course) and presses the light fabric to the wound. “It isn’t deep, look – it probably won’t even scar.”   
  
Staring closer, Theo frowns as though he is making sure. He looks up; James gives him a smile, and he frowns harder. Finally, though, he nods, and moves back.   
  
“Well.” He blows a hair from his forehead. “That was… stimulating.”   
  
James laughs hollowly, once, and turns to get his waistcoat again.  
  
“What happened, though?” Theo asks his back. “Your guard dropped completely.” Still pressing the shirt to the wound, James lifts that arm to get his waistcoat and finds his fingers are trembling. He looks over his shoulder. “I...I was feinting. Trying to get you to attack.”  
  
Breaking into a grin, Theo nods again, pleased. “I  _knew_  you were! I also knew you’d be expecting me to lunge with everything, so I did a feint as well. You see I was going to turn and get you after it but I...ah.” He trails off at James’s neutral face, faltering, taking it as dour. “...Alright, it was a  _little_  enthusiastic an idea. I know, I should just stop trying to outthink you.”   
  
He rolls his eyes good-naturedly and turns to get his own vest and wig, and James takes the opportunity to allow himself to swallow past his dry throat. His stomach is swirling, his head the same. He cannot deny that his heart quickened the minute he saw ‘Jack’, leapt to a challenge and a rich smile, and that is…not good.   
  
“Good thing I  _was_  feinting, though,” Theo continues absently, knotting his cravat. “Could have had your arm off.”  
  
“I hardly think you’d have managed that with an instep so sloppy,” James manages to reply, straightening his wig.   
  
Theo chuckles. “Okay, agreed. I’ll go back on deck and shout at people, we both know I’m better at that then the delicacies of swordplay.” He turns, a presentable officer again. “You off to interrogate Sparrow again, now?”  
  
  
  
  
  
 **i would hate for him to miss it**  
  
He was careful pouring himself the glass of water; he didn’t want to wake Jack before he  _needed_  to be up. Which should be soon.  
  
...Well. ’Should’ being the operative word.   
  
Glancing over his shoulder, James easily read how blissfully comfortable Jack appeared in the bed,  _and_  how unlikely to move any time soon – turned almost completely onto his belly with his face buried in the pillow, the dark cover flicked over one bare hip and his arm across the space James had left when he slipped out. And since Jack was the one leaving by dusk, James was unsure quite why  _he_  was up and crossing to the window of the room, instead of still sleeping as well in a similar position, with that arm across his thighs and Jack’s cheek tacking to his shoulder blade.   
  
That is to say, he knew why he had got up, just not why he was staying so. He’d awoken sweating, skin as flushed as it had been two hours before, a cough tickling in his throat and dizzy although he was laying down. There was no drink to blame whatsoever, unless one counted Jack’s...er. He coloured a little darker and took a sip of his water.  
  
Well, it...ah. It might be at least... _possible_ , couldn’t it? James was sure that he could get drunk on Jack’s mouth, that the man must have imbibed enough rum for it to be in his blood, so why couldn’t there be rum...elsewhere...  
  
He forced himself to stop that train of thought at once. Ridiculous, of course not.   
  
Snorting softly, he shook his head at himself. It must be being here that made his thoughts tumble over each other like this – Tortuga again, though a different pub this time, a different room. Far more expensive, actually, though with good reason. ( _“I’m feelin’ especially **luscious**  today”_, Jack had said with a grin, pulled him down the side alley by the pub and brought out a small embroidered shawl he’d had hidden inside his sash. No doubt stolen from some poor woman’s garden, but when he’d held it up it had been the exact shade of James’s eyes, and Jack had smiled slowly in triumph and kissed him hard.)   
  
Here the window looked sideways along the coast, and the land sloped up away from them to the right with greens of tree-tops and brownish scuffed earth. The sky was almost white around the sun, only just starting to dip down through the blue; the sea was calm. James leant his forearms on the rail crossing between the floor-to-ceiling shutters and watched the way the white-gold light dived into his glass of water and shattered, dancing in the bottom as it did on the ocean floor. Other slanting rays stretched out lazily across the treetops – and his arms, up his neck.   
  
If the shadows they made on him there were anything like the angular ones jutting from the corners of the building, he might possibly be able to imagine why Jack was so enamoured with his jaw.  
  
He took another drink, then rolled the side of the glass along against his forehead. It wasn’t very cold, but it was better than nothing. At least there was a breeze, picking up as the day receded and gusting down over his shoulder blades.  
  
The bed creaked behind him.   
  
He turned to look; Jack was rolling over onto his back, arm dropping onto his chest above where the cover slipped obscenely low.   
  
And this was obscene in a definitely positive manner. Something James hadn’t really been aware could occur until he’d gotten to know Jack.   
  
He smiled softly, wiping the drops of sweat and condensation off his forehead, and walked back to the bed. Jack looked younger, when he was asleep. Though no less dangerous. No, not dangerous; amused…no no no, stro— sensual?   
  
…No less  _Jack_. The shape of his cheekbones and lips lent curves to his face that made it seem he was moving, even when he was still – and yet even when he was weaving and turning, there was something in him that was quiet and focused entirely on you, and utterly...utterly and bloody  _confusing_.   
  
He sighed, rolled his eyes, and took another drink. Jack made a soft noise in his throat, eyebrows twitching, and his mouth parted slightly. The change made his chin braids drop, and they lay against his throat in an X.   
  
 _Marks the spot_ , James thought, and bent down and kissed it.  
  
Jack arched his neck, took a breath in, and woke up. Blinked once, looked down at James’s breeches, and back up. “Goin’ somewhere, love?” he asked, carefully. James rolled his eyes again and put the glass on the dresser. “Jack, do stop asking that. Do you not think if I’d changed my mind I might not only have gone without actually waking you, but perhaps have left some time during the  _first_ —“  
  
“-good bit of buggerin?” Jack finished for him, now smiling pleasantly. James frowned at him, and Jack shrugged at his surprised expression. “Well what else would y’call it?”  
  
He opened his mouth, and shut it. Jack had a point. “Well, you needn’t be so...coarse.”  
  
Flashing gold at him with a little grin, Jack yawned, wrapping his arms around James’s hips and pulling him closer, nuzzling his face into his stomach. James tried not to shiver like his abdominal muscles did, and braced his legs against the attentions of sleepy pirate. He also bit his tongue. He was  _not_  ticklish. “What time is it?” Jack asked his navel.  
  
“About an hour before dusk,” James answered for it, carefully moving the bone in Jack’s hair before it stabbed him, then stroking his knuckles along Jack’s shoulder. Jack hissed slightly, rolling and flexing his neck. Something cracked loudly, and they both chuckled.   
  
“I’m getting old,” Jack murmured, tilting his head up on James’s skin. His chin dug in slightly, but his collarbones rested just on Jack’s hips. James went to answer, but was interrupted by Jack frowning and poking the base of his spine. “And  _you’re_  gettin’ skinny.”   
  
He moved back, splaying a hand on each of James’s hips and holding him still. “Look, I barely have t’straighten my elbows.” He made a stern face at James. “You need to get the cook on your ship t’make you some better food, love. Or I’ll be  _forced_  to come an’ threaten him for makin’ you too bony to molest.”  
  
James’s lips quirked, and he nodded very solemnly. “I’ll be sure to do so.”  
  
“Mind that y’do.” Jack grinned, stretched, looked out the window, and flopped back onto the bed.   
  
  
  
  
 **pirate**  
  
He steals a glance at Jack’s dark head – quiet, looking down from under a little frown at where the cravat had been so white in his hands. He bites his lip, wondering - missing the feel of something, or relishing it? Empty hands. Is that freedom to Jack, or as unsatisfying as he finds it?   
  
Now this was only ever a little fun, wasn’t it? he thinks. They’d met up in Tortuga, Port Royal, his own  _house_  - he’d even slipped aboard the  _Pearl_  one confusing, whirling time, quickest of their meetings in fact, so fast he’d barely even met any crew (which had made things easier) – and now this. A little room in the Windward Isles. Last on the list, he supposed, but then he shouldn't feel bitter, should he, because inbetween the touches and the learning and the lessons and the sway, in the tiny spaces between their rocking hips and sliding mouths there had never been any declarations or promises. They had spent hours doing things that were— were wrong, were carnal sins of course but  _God_ , if they were wrong they should not feel as good as they had.   
  
He curls the hand behind his back inward, nails digging into his palm. He knows the pirate, the  _man_  opposite him by touch now, not just from sight and learned legend. He has gasped and shuddered beside him, on top of and underneath him, felt the low voice lazily tangling in his hair as Jack talked and told and the  _weight_  of it, the weight of Jack watching him during their meetings was so much more than that of his body had been.   
  
Christ, just the thought of catching Jack’s eyes on him, even now. It was a gaze as dark and vast as the ocean, and Jack directed it at  _him_.  
  
It was more. It  _is_  more. It has to be – isn’t it? His judgement cannot be  _that_  impaired, surely. Afterwards, during, before, around; it all swirls into some hazy bit of  _warmth_  in the recent months and he is unwilling to relinquish his hold on it.   
  
Jack is a pirate – yes strangely James has noticed this. But he also knows now that he is not  _just_  that. The memories in his hair, marks on his body are all a testament to that, and he wonders if it is just him, if there may be...  
  
May be what?   
  
May be  _something_? Could you attempt to be specific, James? Good god.   
  
He is just being a fool, that is it. Maybe it’s simply that his senses  _have_  been thrown, by the fact that in the midst of their last meeting as Jack’s arm had curled around his waist and pulled him up, up onto his knees and back against the deep tanned chest – as Jack had sucked kisses onto his neck and thrust even deeper inside and taken hold of James’s length with his now well known hand, that when James had thrown his head back and groaned, he’d tasted blood. That spasms now sometimes grip him, in the night, and once on deck he had to turn and walk to his cabin and brace back against the door when he was inside, biting his fist not to cry out as his lungs kicked and wailed at him.  
  
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Jack close his hands and put them by his side, then lean against the wall.  
  
Nothing.   
  
Jack really is in it for the pleasure.   
  
Surprising, that. Oh but  _of course_. James bites down a derisive chuckle. They’ve felt strange in his mouth recently. He’d gotten used to the fresher humour – only thing that ever really  _did_  taste fresh anymore, above the dullness right in the back, the occasional copper coating his tongue like thick rust unless he stood on deck and let the sea wind whip it away. Foolish, utterly foolish to hope at all: what companionship could he possibly have found anyway, from that man? That  _pirate_.   
  
Jack’ll not be tied down. And it’s not as though James could offer him anything, now, if he ever would have. He doesn’t know. He’d barely started to think about it yet. Not yet.  _Not yet_.  
  
No. He must get a hold of himself. This is simply that, then. An end to...whatever this had been. They’ve run aground, so to speak. He’ll not regret it, when they part; he’s learnt much. For a man famed for stealing, Jack certainly gives a lot.   
  
It would be easier, perhaps, if he hadn’t.   
  
But, one must look on the bright side. And if that’s not the most sodding  _condescending_  thing he’s ever heard then he doesn’t know what is, but he’s learned irrational anger will not change the situation. At the very least, it will be a relief to not have to lie anymore. It had hardly been befitting for his belief in honesty and justice, to slip away from his sailors and friends when in port, or to actually take leave for a third time. No holidays for ten years, and during the last one he has asked for three. Ridiculous.   
  
The smile playing at the corner of his eyes had first confused his men. Even Theodore, who’d been irrepressible. “You’re having someone!” he’d breathed, peering close at James one night when they’d dropped the titles for a quiet drink.   
  
Speak first, slap self and act composedly right after, was Theodore.   
  
And James couldn’t deny it, either. Had gaped somewhat, coughing in surprise, tapped his fist on his chest and looked away. “Ah...” Looked back. “Possibly...”   
  
Eventually, in order to cease the questioning, he had smiled a little more and described somebody with sinful, lilting fingers, but he refused to say any more.   
  
He doesn’t know if Theodore has guessed it is a man. For once he’d kept his mouth closed. Just smiled back and looked down, replied only that he  _had_  been planning to tell his own secret but now he felt James’s was enough for the night, and taken another sip of his drink.   
  
Having him on side, though, had undoubtedly been helpful in cutting off one Antony Gillette’s other kinds of questions. These not said but  _implied_ , through waggling eyebrows, quirking lips and narrowing dark eyes. It took James a long time to feel comfortable with anyone, and no matter how long he’d been stationed with the…persistent Antony, he still wasn’t ready to answer anything specific to him.  
  
Luckily, they were the only ones who would have openly asked.  _Commodore_  had never been more of a blessing than in its ability to make people take a half step backwards. It had been invaluable in stopping the other questions. The ones that came when the smile dropped away, when he was frowning from the headaches pressing down above his eyebrows, down to make even his eye sockets feel heavy. When he found it hard to focus on a map, was late to rise two mornings, when that cough just wouldn’t go away.   
  
He didn’t appreciate the reminder of the bout of pneumonia he had suffered following his extended dance with the sea near Nassau, after a wave had swept him and the two junior officers he’d been trying to call back out with it, in the midst of a storm. He’d directed his orders from the chopping water, holding onto the anchor line as the others were pulled back onboard, the wind whipping the sea up and the rain lashing down, but he’d been so  _cold_  by the time he was back on deck. The bones of his knuckles had started shining through the shuddering grip he’d known was slipping, his breath had come in shivers and puffs of steam, tremors had run up his legs – tremors that had spread to his whole body by the next sunrise.   
  
Being strong beforehand had made his recovery a little easier, but as storms did, it had left the outlook of what it touched changed. Far more than anyone had expected.   
  
It may have been that experience which made the men more attuned to his condition.   
  
Now that he’s informed his superior, though, no doubt every slightly strange slip of behaviour will simply be chalked up to the illness. He only found out that what he’d simply thought was lingering illness was to be the death of him six days ago. Consumption. He should have suspected, but Molly was such a long time ago. Being told had brought so much back in vivid colour, suddenly, but he had still been a child in so many ways when he and Theo left for the Navy. He hadn’t paid much attention to her symptoms, only if she were feeling better.   
  
He’s tried to stay away from close contact with his men as much as possible, now that he knows. He’s said that he will endeavour to finish out the next couple of weeks until someone is hopefully found to replace him.   
  
By the end of that time, perhaps even less, he’s sure that everyone will be talking about it. It’s a small Port, he is a well known man not just out on the water but here, and he’ll not make it back to England before he’s mainly house ridden.  
  
He is  _not_  looking forward to how the ache for the water will add to the other pains.  
  
Well, at least giving his reasons for leaving to a faintly apoplectic Governor Swann two days before had been a conversation he’d only have to have once. He’d been loathe to go, though he'd known he  _had_ to, but Theodore had offered to walk with him once he mentioned that he planned to visit the Governor, saying he had an appointment to talk over finding a new housekeeper for the bigger house in the Port he’d recently purchased. James had had no reason to dally anymore, then.   
  
He’d asked that the Governor not tell anyone that didn’t yet need to know, and for all he’s not really one to stand up to much, James respects his word that he can be absolutely trusted in this.   
  
“Seen a lot of it in England,” the Governor had said, stumbling over words slightly and laying a hand on his shoulder partway through. “I...I’m most dreadfully sorry, James.”   
  
He’d nodded once, and gone. Had to lean back against the wall outside the door for a second to catch his breath, but kept walking.   
  
At the front door, Elizabeth and William were just coming in. She’d smiled brightly and caught his hands, kissed his cheek and made him promise to come to supper when he got back. He couldn’t have told her then, with the sun lighting her hair to spun gold and earnest affection on her face. The same look that could often be seen on Jack’s face, when his unlikely allies were brought up.   
  
He half suspected Elizabeth knew about he and that pirate, not that he would  _ever_  have brought it up. Jack, James knew, got word to them (sporadically), and though he realised that the thought of his former fianceé knowing ought to fill him with dread, he felt somehow that she might just...understand. It was unheard of, but then, she was truly a remarkable woman. He would miss the...notion of her, until he died.   
  
William, on the other hand,  _undoubtedly_  knew.   
  
James could never work out whether Jack looked on him as a son, or a brother – or perhaps even with a slightly different cast to his eyes, at one time, but whatever it was, he was sure Jack had confided in him. And the boy had stayed to watch James walk back down the drive and through the gates, with a frown and a hand shading his eyes. A steadfast figure in the doorway.   
  
For all that James should bedgrudge him, he was a bright and loyal lad. He ultimately found he couldn’t help but respect his courage and openness.   
  
Would that he had the same ability to accept what was in his blood with such grace.   
  
He clears his throat, lifts his head, and tries to regain some of that. He doesn't look at Jack as sets about retying his cravat, as quickly as he can. No matter how long it took him to do, Jack had always seemed to be able to undo it so easily, roll of his fingers here, flick of his wrist there.   
  
This is awkward, horrid. He wonders at how he can possibly tie it around the lump in his throat.  
  
Though it's nothing, of course - oh, it's  _nothing_  to when he had told Theodore and Anthony. That had been the worst. (For yes, this was something he did feel able to say to  _both_  of them. Which was obscure – but then, he didn’t have much of a choice or way to protect  _this_  secret. Nor did he want to, as he had with Jack. Which was also strange, he knows.) The very same day as Governor Swann, he’d made it. Set his jaw and gotten it done.  
  
With Anthony, it had felt like a let down. Something...premature. They were new friends.   
  
With Theodore, it had already been old.   
  
He’d gone to Theo first, that was right. It had been just them, and a dull pain like an old wound flaring when Theo’s usually held high head had dropped, his whole posture slumping as he’d stumbled backwards and sat down hard at James’s desk. James had felt his ear throb from the hot stab of reminder between them: the slate grey house in Islington and little gloved fingers throwing paper cranes into the air to land in the lake on his land, children’s rhymes fluttering back to his change his name and whirl away with a swoosh of skirts and boots.  _Molly_  and her tight brown curls, and crumbling lips like the cliffs of Dover when they’d sailed away.   
  
The thought of Theodore’s folded inward face, now, is even worse than hers. He supposes that shocked palour had rather mimicked his own.   
  
Jack looks up, suddenly, as though he might say something. James yanks the last knot and walks firmly to the door. Uniform neat again, head straight forward, eyes on the handle. This wasn't how he'd wanted it to go, but he will leave with dignity.  
  
For Jack, he had never meant to tell.   
  
It was laughable, yes. Out of everyone, Christ, even his  _Father and brother_ , he’d not wanted to say it to Jack. But Jack was a knot he didn’t want to untangle. Jack was spices and sea air and storm encased in skin – he was beautiful and he made James’s hands shake for want of touching him, even when he was. He’d managed to tip everything upside down  _and_  right it again, and James had wanted to be able to just cut him loose and walk away. To try and have some measure of control over this part of his life when usually he couldn’t.   
  
Oh he’d told himself that he would not kiss him, not risk mixing them too closely that way, and that he would tell him  _immediately_. But Jack had practically leapt upon him the moment he’d walked through the door, pushed him back against it and set upon kissing his throat, ignoring the (stuttered) protests he’d given, (even as he couldn't resist running one hand up the graceful line of Jack’s spine, last gasp touch.)   
  
How he  _ever_  thought he might have been able to fool Jack for long, he doesn’t know.   
  
It’s probably lucky that Jack spotted the blood before he even had to really try. It made telling it easier.   
  
Though it does nothing, of course, to aid walking away.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
 **yes, I’m a bit nervous myself**  
  
Right. Well. He’s going to disregard anything Jack said the first time, because that mouth  _is_  a  _sin_.   
  
Jack’s lips had been cold from outside but now, after James had pulled him through the study window and right up into a starved kiss (teeth clacking, lips bruising), after the two of them had tumbled back and barely remained upright, not even broken apart as they stumbled up his stairs (hands pushing under layers, rough palms burning skin) – oh,  _now_  they were flushed and dark around his cock, hot tongue playing with the underside and making the fresh bite on the inside of his right thigh pulse.   
  
He’s never stared at his bedhead from  _this_  angle before. Laying flat back, bare legs off the end of the bed with his breeches tangled around his ankles, knees bent and Jack between them. His toes were curling on the wood floor without him being consciously aware of it as his thighs were held loosely apart – but in reality they were dropping easily,  _shamelessly_  open, and it was Jack’s doing, this apparent loss of control over his limbs, all because of that— oh  _Christ_  — that mouth.   
  
He was cupping the back of Jack’s head, but knew his spasming fingers were doing nothing more than resting against the plait at the back, as Jack lapped his tongue over the tip of his length then bobbed his mouth down. His head was arching back as a reflex, and it was doing nothing for the already sore muscles (he’d been serving very long days recently), but since he seemed to have lost control of most of his body, this was less of a concern. It had also led to this upside-down and surreally bland wooden view, given the richness of the man between his knees. But at least the lack of detail helped him try to stay calm.   
  
Stay.  _calm_.   
  
Except his entire upper body was bowed and tight as a sail, his shoulder blades and free hand digging into the covers – which actually, let it be said,  _were_  rather nice; deep red, soft and perhaps decadent enough even for Captain Jack Sparrow, this tight and expensive weave his mother had sent him five or so years ba— oh good  _God_  what was he think—  
  
He moaned, releasing the cover from its assault to slap a hand over his eyes. The resounding thwack of palm on skin matched even the wet noises from the  _mouth_  on skin happening between his legs, and Jack chuckled wickedly. Quite how he managed that with this mouth so…well, James had  _no_  idea, but it wasn’t helping the situation. He now had nail marks in his temple from the buzz and vibration it had given him, a throb shooting along his cock and sparks flaring up into his belly.   
  
And painting it in a negative light was of course a huge lie because yes it  _was_  helping, and Jack needed to do it again, quite soon please, because—  
  
He cried out, clutching the plait of hair on the back of Jack’s head. Jack had taken him in entirely, and his hips jerked up helplessly into the wet heat. He couldn’t have stopped his body taking over itself even if he’d wanted to.   
  
Jack curled fingers tighter over his thighs, thumbs slipping into the slightly sweaty junctures of his groin as he took the thrusts, holding still as James jerked up again, twice more, gasping out loud. Then forcefully Jack pushed his hips down and held him still. Moved a little.   
  
Hollowed his cheeks and  _sucked_.  
  
James came hard and completely unexpectedly, one foot flexing out and smacking dully on the floor. He half shouted again, body flashing open like a fish breaking the water’s surface, and threw his head forward, struggling up onto his elbow even as he emptied himself – he needed to look. Wide-eyed and shuddering and almost unable to believe it himself, he saw; tremors twitching in his abdomen, dirt in Jack’s knuckles and— oh god he was looking  _up_  eyes open straight at James straight  _into_  him as he pulled back a little slick heat tiny wet swallows—  
  
James shuddered again, choking, and finished. With a groan, he flopped back onto the bed, hand dropping to rest bonelessly on Jack’s shoulder.  
  
Slowly, things righted again. When he opened his eyes, there was the ceiling, flat and still. More familiar.   
  
His chest was heaving, however. And he knew that later was Jack would introduce him to the experience of being...filled – and, yes, the still fully clothed man crawling up over his body and the dark, smiling face suddenly blocking his view was still new, as well.  
  
He didn’t mind.   
  
  
  
  
  
 **man overboard**  
  
“What on  _earth_  do you think you a— Christ!”   
  
There is a pirate standing in a puddle of sea water on his cabin floor.   
  
“Shh!” Jack hisses, waving his hands frantically. He darts past and closes the door with his hip, leaving a shiny wet mark on the wood. “Forgettin’ the whole mess of other blokes on the ship,  _you_ -” he punctuates this with a vicious point towards James’s face, “-shouldn’t be puttin’ strain on them lungs.”  
  
Well. Leave it to Jack to dive right in to the difficult topic.   
  
James sets his jaw at the reminder. Just for a second, a  _second_ , things had been as dazzling as the buckle on Jack’s belt. A blanch ripples across his face and he tries to catch it, but it passes too quickly.   
  
Jack opens his mouth. Shuts it again. Suddenly his eyes are soft and he stands, hand still out in the air, appearing for a moment as though he is floundering– no, that is something James cannot cope with. Cannot bear.   
  
He will not deal with pity or people being unsure what to say, with awkward silences filled with the clink of china as the subject is politely skirted in the hope it will slip behind flapping white curtains and be lost in the startling expanse of sky. Jack takes a step towards him, saying “ _James_ “, and James steps back, raising his chin.   
  
Goddamn it, just because his lungs are collapsing doesn’t mean he is weak. “What do you want, Jack?”  
  
Jack draws his hand back, and goes still. Doesn’t answer.   
  
And then he just...looks. Leans back against the door again, flattening his shoulders on the wood and resting his head back. James lowers his chin because...he doesn’t know this.   
  
If he ever saw Jack again – if, like some twisting, fidgetting dream’s example Jack ever turned up, he was…oh he might have considered what Jack might say (and how) but this is quiet. He keeps thinking he should say something but now he is the one with awkwardness lodged in his throat.   
  
Jack’s head tilts slowly and his eyes move – over James’s eyebrows, nose, mouth. With a gulp James manages to swallow. The lump thumps into his stomach and sends out ripples; barely half a minute of the slow, evaluating look, and his body already feels hollowed out and filled with sloshing water, running all the way to his palms and turning his hands cold.   
  
Substantial though the real puddle Jack is already making is, drops running off his coat and sash to splash by his boots, there is still some in his hair, dripping from the plaits and locks and flicking from his twin braids. It runs down over the brown skin visible in the v of his shirt but he makes no sign he’s even noticed. Absently, he rubs both palms dry on his thighs and then steps closer, holding one out again.   
  
“You’re ruining the floor,” James blurts.   
  
“’s a ship, James,” Jack murmurs, watching his hand moving over and cupping the air by James’s elbow, an inch above his coat. His fingers settle lightly in the folds of fabric and James stares at his bowed wet head, the worn tricorn washed to brilliance, willing Jack to at least  _attempt_  to make some sense for once. Look up, say something. Go. (Stay.) But yet again, nothing, and he looses him in a blink; Jack steps past his shoulder and out of view.   
  
James bites his tongue, and brings his head up to stare steadfastly at the door – damn him,  _damn_  him for this.   
  
“What are you  _doing_  here, Jack?” he repeats.   
  
Nothing.   
  
“ ** _Jack!_** ”  
  
Silence. It’s so unusual for— oh, a palm skimming over the back of his coat. Feel of Jack close by, the hint of warm breath on the back of his neck. Excellent.  
  
Is Jack teasing him? He turns, trying to get the man to face him but Jack just moves away again in a perfect evasive move, and he stops angrily. It  _is_  teasing.   
  
 _Got bored, did he?_  James frowns.  _Come to see if I’m still well enough for a fuck, is that it?_  He changes his mind in the instant and does whirl. “Jack,  _cease_  this—”   
  
A hand claps over his mouth and cuts off his speech.   
  
It’s familiar, but not exact. Jack’s eyes are shut this time, and because he’d reached up his fingers splay over James’s cheek, the tip of his thumbnail in James’s eyelashes. The hand smells of salt, dull leather, damp wood; the rough skin is cool on James’s mouth but he feels flushed with Jack so close suddenly that he can see how the water beads on his cheekbones and turns his eyebrows to dark pen strokes – how like this is to the first time he met him, wet on a jetty—  _Christ_ , he hadn’t thought of that. It seemed so long ago.  
  
Jack moves his hand. He cups one of James’s cheeks for a moment, then raises the other hand too, and starts to trace James’s features that way instead.   
  
His fingers stretch up to James’s hairline, finding the pins for the wig and pulling them out, pushing it off to land in the water on the floor. Somewhere, James winces, but overriding everything else he just holds his breath and watches Jack.   
  
The touch combs down through his hair to the tie, flipping under the tail and tugging lightly once on it, then back – brushing down over his eyes with the deceptively delicate fingers, the bridge of his nose, lips, chin and throat. That damnable cravat. James blinks and tries to watch the concentration on Jack’s face, movements underneath his eyelids. Jack is...is mapping him, going over each detail and ignoring nothing – the shape and bob of his adam’s apple, nails along the crease of his cravat and then inside, two fingers flat in the hollow of his throat and down.   
  
This is not seductive, the most confusing thing of all. And James thinks he’s entirely justified in being confused, feels a little unsteady, but at the same time Jack’s touch draws him with it like a compass point on his skin, making everything else drop away.  
  
The hands keep going. Down his chest, one finger bouncing down over each gold button and testing the embroidery. Then they start to undo; buttons popped, hands slipping inside, opening and untying and pushing back layers —  _oh god_ , he realises with a gasp, and clutches at Jack’s arms to stop him.   
  
Jack opens his eyes, and looks up.   
  
His gaze is gentle and says nothing but  _quiet_. He doesn’t say a word, just waits; James stares back at him, working the muscles in his jaw, aware of the bump of Jack’s wrists pressing into the centre of his hands. He’s drawn tight automatically, body tense and closed in, but Jack simply looks at him and he…loosens. There is something, in Jack’s face, and he doesn’t know what but it’s familiar – at least he thinks, but he really couldn’t care less because it’s bare and harsh and loose at the edges. What he was looking for.   
  
He opens his grip.   
  
Jack continues to move as if there was no pause. The only difference is now he keeps his eyes up, doesn’t look away as he pushes aside James’s warm inner shirt, peeling away where it was sticking to his lower back. His touch meets skin, palms skating the sides of James’s ribcage up as far as they can go until the backs of his knuckles meet the bunched edges of coat, and then back down, curving round. James’s breath hitches, and then Jack  _does_  lower his head again, looking at his hands where one is braced on each pale, pale side. He pauses like that with James’s lungs under his palms, and James thinks that Jack caught that breath and is holding it for him.  
  
He is attempting to try and say something again when Jack lets out his own slow breath and nods, once. He moves in and presses a kiss right to the centre of James’s chest, between the arcs of bone.   
  
James’s mouth is open but nothing is coming out, he is rendered soundless even as the room rushes with noise. Jack nudges his chest gently with his wet forehead and nose – it’s cold at the tip and James wants to laugh, hysterically – kisses his skin again, turning his face to lay his cheek flat on it with another nod. “Aye,” he murmurs, answering something James didn’t ask. Arms slide further and wrap around, and Jack rises until they are face to face again. “I knew it.”   
  
He smiles widely.   
  
Then falters.  
  
Tugs James in to kiss him.   
  
James flinches back, gasping. “No!” He holds his hands up, trying to take a step backwards towards his wig in a puddle on the floor. “Jack, I’m—you might—“  
  
Jack just follows, grip tightening. “Not my biggest concern right now.”   
  
As Jack’s lips touch his, James freezes. Hot, hot, his mouth is cold and Jack’s presses to him with—  _Jack_  presses to him with—  _ **Jack**_ —  
  
He hitches again, opens his mouth, and  _goes_. Clutches back and screws his eyes shut and kisses as well, sound bubbling up and bursting in the back of his throat into a shivering cry. Jack shushes him, moving to cup the back of his head, sucks his trembling bottom lip. Mouths pressed back hard together and long strokes with his tongue, nails digging into his sides.  
  
James doesn’t really notice when Jack turns gentle suddenly, breaking away to nuzzle up under his chin, then darts back with water whipping from the ends of his hair and cracks him across the head with his pistol.


	3. Chapter 3

 

_ I’m sinking like a stone in the sea  
I’m burning like a bridge for your body _

  
_ [Tautou, Brand New] _

 

**may I have a moment?**

“What happened there?”

James just woken up, hair endearingly wild and breeches loosely pulled on. He’d come over to the table where Jack was reading with his bare feet up, snagged an orange slice from the untouched bowl (Jack hadn’t wanted to get sticky fingers on the pages) and sat on the edge of the table while he ate it. Been about to say something else but frowned instead, reached over the top of the book and smoothed his free fingers into the faint depression on the top of Jack’s left bicep, clear suddenly given his position. 

Glancing down, Jack folded his book closed in his lap. “What d’you think it looks like?” He tipped back a little in the chair so James could see clearly, digging his heels into the table’s surface to hold on. The movement was lazy, though James had to be going soon.

Same spur of the moment but nonetheless fierce concentration from James as always; he tilted his head, eating the slice absently. “A…” Sucked the juice off his thumb and wiped his fingers clean on Jack’s breeches (“Ay!”) before wrapping one hand around Jack’s ankle to hold himself steady as he reached out and ran a vaguely damp index finger along the undercurve of the scar. 

“A horseshoe.” He frowned, then looked again. “Er. Half.” Snorting once, he sat back. “Half a  _horseshoe_ , Jack.”

Jack grinned, looking too, folding his arm across his bare chest and balling a fist to pull it all into clarity. “Oh I know. No doubt about right for my luck.” He grinned up at James, who gave another soft chuckle. Oranges on his breath. 

Setting all four legs of the chair back on the ground, Jack took a slice himself, scratching the mark idly, then gestured with the hand holding the orange as he explained. “No, I took a whallop from me mam’s horse when I was a lad. Nearly broke the bone, too – looked like the inside of a conch shell for a week.” James leaned slightly to the right to avoid the flying juice, listening intently. “Temperamental old mare.” A faint smile touched Jack’s wet lips, orange glinting on them almost like the gold on his teeth. “Same for the horse, actually.” 

He got the deadly Commodore eyebrow, at speaking so coarsely of his mother. 

Just grinned, picking up his book again. 

James reached for another slice, looking about the room for the rest of his uniform – and he left his other hand where it was, fingers curling over the bump of Jack’s ankle and tracing lines over the skin. It was making his knee tingle, which was distracting, but it wasn’t that which made him stop before he’d even opened the pages again properly. He found himself staring off above it, then tilted his head, tapped the spine on the edge of the table as he looked up. “An’ you know the oddest thing?” he asked, as if there had been no lapse in the conversation.

James stopped, halfway off the table with his eyes on his shirt, draped over a boot (Jack’s?) halfway underneath the cot. “What?” he asked easily, needing no more than half a second to realise what Jack was talking about again.

“...I’m not entirely sure which of them I miss more.”

Clearly, James didn’t know how to reply to that. So he said nothing, just stroked his thumb over Jack’s ankle once. 

But that  _was_  the right thing, Jack thought. 

Also, he was too far away. 

He grinned again at James, and pulled his legs back sharply, dropping his feet to slap back on the floor. James was brought jerking after, knocked the bowl over as he skidded along the edge with a little shout. Leaning forwards, Jack caught him; hooked arms under his, and pulled him down sideways into his lap. 

Ignoring the sudden bounce of weight on his still sensitive crotch for the warmth he got instead, he watched James’s irritation war with the remains of the soft look on his face. Then, with an exasperated, amused little sigh, James stretched his long legs out and crossed them at the ankle, and relaxed. Shook his head in bemusement at Jack, then brushed knuckles along the edge of his jaw. Paused and flicked the metal in his hair as a punishment, setting it to swinging heavily. Jack smiled, then ducked his head and set about sucking a quick sticky peach-orange shape just under James’s chin. Nice little reminder, since he’d be gone in twenty minutes.

For a smart bloke, he  _never_  seemed to catch onto that move. 

 

 

 

 

 

**in the hands of a pirate**

For the Captain of a great and beautiful ship, he’s done a lot of bloody rowing, recently.

He addresses the wide-eyed Navy sailors in their groups, kept nice and still by his crew’s swords and his  _Pearl_  alongside, with a speech befitting his Commodore. Turns out if you walk out with an unconscious one of these in your arms and stand on the main deck with a pistol at his lolling head, you get at least 40 seconds of shocked silence – and by the time there are guns back at you, your ship can have slipped alongside and your crew started to board. 

Or maybe it happens just this for one, he thinks, stealing a sideways glance at the closed face on the floor at his feet, and the very readable circle turned towards him.

He’d told Moises and Anamaria to make sure they got a couple of Lieutenants to the fore – one of them he recognises as Gillette, the other he doesn’t know by name, but it’s that dark haired one Anamaria floored months back. When he lifts James’s body from the deck after he’s finished talking, carrying him (and he’s a taller so this is quite impressive, ta) with Gibbs following, one pistol trained on James’s lolling head and the other out to protect his Captain, they pass the men – and Anamaria, holding the same Lieutenant upright with a knife at his throat. She doesn’t bother to hide the smirk, curving right into the corners of her full mouth.

She stops smiling when the Lieutenant suddenly jerks, though, throwing his bound fists sideways into her shoulder and knocking her to the ground. Her blade nicks him just under the jaw, but he simply spins, eyes on Jack, the action sending a few drops of blood whipping out and splattering onto his loose collar in an almost (and ridiculously) familiar image. Jack would have raised his eyebrow, but the Officer is running towards him with fierce anger in his face and a few shouts from the men as accompaniment. 

Gibbs falters at the charge, (and alright, when he thinks about it, Jack’ll agree perhaps he ought to have discussed what to do if something like this happened, point taken), and the Officer throws an elbow towards him that makes him bellow and duck. Gives him the chance to make a lunge for Jack. 

Skittering backwards, he draws James closer automatically but the bloke bloody  _pounces_ , yelling, scrabbling at his arm curling tight round James’s shoulder. He’s not letting go, not now, and the three of them tumble to the deck, his knees crashing to the wood and sending shocks up his legs even as Anamaria rights herself and scrambles after. He can’t help the snarl at the officer as his grip is yanked away,  _no get **off** , I’m helping_, wriggles and sets his teeth and holds tight even though he knows the man’s just trying to protect his superior. His friend, clearl—

—Groves. 

Oh. This is  _Theodore._

The realisation makes him slacken a second, curve of James’s spine bumping down his braced thighs. As fate would have it, and she’s been buggering them about recently so she owes them one, the Lieutenant freezes too. His fingers are twisted with Jack’s, digging into James’s jacket, and Groves stares at them hard, mouth dropping slightly, then jerks his head up. Jack leans back against the wall of the ship, trying to balance James across his knees and keep his grip, and eyes him. Behind them, Gibbs staggers up again, cursing, and Anamaria reaches them. 

Who knows, maybe they teach palm reading to the Navy now or something, but Groves obviously finds something – because he doesn’t resist when Anamaria grabs the back of his hair under the askew wig, a flash in the moonlight preceding the press of her short knife to his throat. Wrenched backwards, Groves drops Jack’s hand and has both arms pulled up behind him but he just continues to  _stare_ , and Jack is startled by the change in his expression and the sudden slump of his whole body, going slack as James’s. 

He only struggles again when Anamaria starts to lift him right to his feet. He gasps suddenly, trying to wrench out the arms she’s got hold of, head diving back towards James. Jack gestures vaguely to Ana to let him, as he watches; she frowns, huffing her disagreement, but when he flicks his eyes sideways and points at her silently, she finally relents, nostrils flaring. 

Crouching without a backwards glance, Groves reaches immediately for James’s arm, dropped across the deck. He brushes his fingertips slowly over the upturned palm, then swallows, head bowed, and nods imperceptibly to Jack. 

He keeps his gaze down as he allows himself to be lifted, and walked back to the others. Gillette starts to struggle even harder upon his return, straining at Moises’ tight grip on his arms. Groves quiets him with a look. 

Jack is grateful, but not entirely sure why.

Gibbs hands over the pistol and takes his James from him, his stout back helping to carry the weight down the steep boarding plank to the  _Pearl_. Jack waits until he hears old feet touch the boards of his ship, then half smiles, and gives a polite nod to the Navy. His crew take the signal to release everyone and cross to him, in a somewhat orderly fashion (Ana throws a look back over her shoulder at Groves, part confusion and part possible respect, but Groves’ attention is fixed on what he can see of James, lain on the  _Pearl_ ’s deck with Gibbs standing over him, a sword to his throat, and he breaks it only occasionally to flick them back to Jack and almost pierce his composure with his  _eyes_ ). 

Streaming down the plank behind him, their cutlasses and pistols high, his crew is unusually silent. Jack tugs his sash tight again, bows, and follows. Backwards, pistol up.

Not a shot fired. 

The anchor is lifted, the main sail unfurled, and as the  _Pearl_ is caught in the night breeze and starts to speed away a rush goes across the  _Dauntless_. The men all start to move as one, there are shouts to wake everyone, give chase. Groves and Gillette run straight to the edge – Groves leans the furthest over to watch them go, so far that the lanterns held by other crew cease to light his face anymore. When Jack tips his hat, however, he catches another tentative nod.

He fancies Groves is still there when they’re far enough away that he can hold the  _Dauntless_  between his forefinger and thumb, before the darkness closes around it, when he’s sitting on the deck with James’s head in his lap, his other hand twisting gently into James’s hair and tracing the lump on his temple. 

The bruise speedily turns deep red, then purple, dark blue, while the sky goes many shades lighter. Within a couple of hours, by the time it really starts to come up, it’s fully day, and just he and Jack. 

Back in the jollyboat.

Jack has been careful with James so far, kept him close and warm, but now as he rows he keeps pausing to look down at the form stretched out in the bottom. He reaches down to poke him – an arm or his shoulder, even his side once when the first made no reaction, just to see him twitch. Until he finally starts shifting a little in his ‘sleep’, Jack finds it unnerving, seeing James so still, even for him. 

At least everything basically goes to his plan, apart from the thing with Groves. Or, for a while, until the bit where he doesn’t get to bring James round with touch and low words and kisses, as he’d hoped. 

The thud of stone cracking and booming on stone does that.

 

 

 

 

**a short drop and a sudden stop**

_Ohhh_ , blasted, bloody Jesus, Mary and—

James sits up fast, then tips forward as his heavy head rolls, raising his hand to the throb on it. He can’t hold back a soft moan, even though he has been getting used to headaches, recently even waking up with them after coughing in the night. But this type of pain is new, and he’s...blurred, slightly – the last thing he can remember clearly is a kiss. Well, that’s Jack – he lifts his head carefully to look around for him, but winces as the thump vibrates all across his temples. And hold a moment,  _that_  was Jack, too, wasn’t it? Or, no, is that just the echo of the sound that woke him up, bouncing around his mind now and making him woozy as he tries to focus in the dim at curving walls of...wait, is that rock?

Then as he sits back and tries to take a calming breath to clear his thoughts, with a spasm and  _oh, no_ , his lungs grab hold and dig in, and everything is forgotten in the black rush of trying to breathe. 

His chest flashes, burns, draws in tight and shallow. The breath turning into a wheeze, tensing up, he drops a hand to brace on the floor and concentrates. Push past it. Don’t cough, push out, make the space for one full breath, just the one, that’s all he will need. 

He is focusing so fiercely that he doesn’t hear Jack come over – but there he is, black and gold in the edges of James’s vision, hazy like he’s underwater. Jack crouches quickly, reaching round to pull him up — James pushes him violently away, even going up onto his knees so as to turn aside. He wraps his  _own_  arm around his ribs and bites his tongue,  _forcing_  a breath, but that becomes a hack, and a choke, and the colourful burst of copper deep in his throat that seems to spray the immediate tears up behind his squeezed-shut eyes.

He splutters, hunches over, shouts in his mind as the coughing begins. Jack says something to him, soft and rumbling red, – “ _Ah, sorry but no, love_ ,” and he thinks that it can only be an apology for that attempt – but then he is tipping over. Jack’s arm comes around over his own and pulls him gently, gently back, his shoulders meet a chest warm enough to feel through his coat, and Jack’s legs come up either side to brace him. 

He doesn’t have the energy to move again and Jack knows it. He uses it to his advantage, that bloody, bloody  _pirate_. All James can do is slump back against him, gasping, coughing, head tipped to the close ceiling and tight flush in his cheeks. It’s as though he’s swallowed air and it has condensed to thick cloud in his chest, pressing and expanding in the space until there is no room for breath, just this hard, thick wet mist – and it turns him, tips him, flips him in a wave to an ungainly mess. 

He didn’t want anyone to see this. Especially, for God’s sake especially not  _Jack_. The only reason Jack had ever even looked at him in the first place was because he has… well, he is aware that he is tall and clean and open faced, but he also knows that no-one’s curiosity would stretch  _this_  far. Not even Jack’s. Never mind under the wig, try under the skin as his colour fades, as he gurgles and eventually, oh God, he will eventually drown – try seeing that. Try  _touching_  that, Jack, as he had been so concentrated on doing in his cabin – for the memory of that surfaces, letting James compare them bitterly, and his chest rattles as he tries to suck a breath as he thinks of Jack looking and touching as he…remembers. 

Goes boneless  _oh_. 

Jack is rocking him gently, hands fluttering down his sides. He pushes his almost fey face into the side of James’s neck, murmuring something soft, and it is a good thing Jack is holding him up because with the sudden reminder he is burst open and gushing out on the floor, light headed, amazed. Perhaps  _not_  the best moment to remember breathless-making things; his head spins but he does his best to focus on the simple warmth he’s being given instead. Blinks, fights and coughs, and scrabbles hold of one breath as one hand does the same into Jack’s thigh. 

He gets another,  _finally_ , and then another, and lights rush up from behind his closed eyes and start to prickle and clear. Things start to slow (though they are thumping and speeding up at the same time), and he is acutely aware of the slight rasp of Jack’s beard against his skin each time either one of them moves.

No-one has touched him like this since he found out. Especially since he started getting worse – the doctor did merely a cursory examination, and he wouldn’t let his friends. 

He finds, now, that it hurts and soothes at the same time. 

Chest heaving and finally  _breathing_  hoarsely, his eyes sting open and he drops his head back onto Jack’s shoulder. He has his own hand over his pounding heart; Jack slips his underneath, turns it palm up to lace fingers with his, kisses the wild pulse in his neck. 

There is sticky almost-blood in his mouth, just inside the swell of his bottom lip. It tastes like earth, and poisoned air, and copper. He can’t raise the energy to suck it away. 

Jack wipes it with his thumb, and presses his mouth gently to where it was. 

Flinching, shock gives James the stimulus to move. He struggles up and turns, pulling his hand free to wipe across his mouth, shuddering, shivering in dismay, and overwhelmed. “What are you…you…” 

Jack says nothing again. This quiet side to him is harder to read than his gestures attempt to be. He doesn’t let James move free from the circle of his arms, though; slowly reaches up and wipes his palm across the sweat on James’s head, brushes his hair back for him, careful of the lump. 

James swallows. This touch may be even gentler than before, but it is nothing against the lines of Jack’s face. Open, soft, too much to hold in one expression and so spilling into his body, curved towards James. 

“What did you do?” he asks, hoarsely. 

“I’ve got a plan,” Jack answers, and gets up.

James watches him go, swaying easily over stone and further into the cave. He dashes his hand across his eyes, making himself look clearly, then calls croakily after him. “Jack, I...I thank you for coming back, and I...” He cuts himself off, and swallows. Breathes the somewhat stale air in through his nose. “You must understand that this is not something we can…purse, and—and while your sentiments are...” He trails off. 

Jack has climbed to stand behind a stone chest in the centre of a high ceilinged part of the cave. The crags pull aside to make a clearing in which it sits, and there is a large rectangular slab of the same stone lying on the floor next it. It must be the lid – and it must have been that, James realises, which made the noise, for dust motes it threw up when it landed are turning slowly in a beam of sun filtering through a crack in the roof. 

Jack is staring down into the chest, and he beckons James up with a ripple of his fingers.

Pushing himself to his feet, James stumbles over, one hand over his ribs. He is a little more concerned, however, with the sort of realisation dawning dull and thick in his stomach. 

Standing the other side of the chest, he follows Jack’s gaze down.

Gold. Hundreds of grinning, winking pieces of gold. 

He blinks, and remembers pirates unearthly in the moonlight. Fierce, alive but dead, knocked down and getting up again.

Jack doesn’t move under his look.

“Take one,” he says. 

 

* * *

 

 

  
**but you have heard of me**

“So lemme get this straight.” He shuffled, leant an elbow on the scarred table and curled his fingers around his tankard. “You’re sayin’ Captain  _Jack Sparrow_  snuck on the ship and just…took Norrin’ton away in the dead of night?”

“Mm!”

“...Okay. An’ not  _only_  this, but he’d  _planned_  it. Actually. Made. a speech.”

“Yep.”

“A speech about how enemies owed it to each other to make sure their legends continued in a...what was it?”

“A suitable way.”

“O-kay. And he did all of this, he went to all this trouble, just ’cause Norrin’ton had consumption?”

“Yep. Announced that fact to a ship who didn’t actually know yet, actually. Said it wasn’t right for the great Commodore Norrington to go down that way.”

“Right.” Henry nodded, and leant back in the bench seat. “That, my friend, is bollocks.” He swigged his ale and slammed it on the table as if to press his point.

Richard frowned. He knew this movement made his face tighten into an amalgamation of strange angles, but he was too busy being suddenly and irrationally irritated to be vain. “It’s true!”

“ _Come on!_  He didn’t want to fade away—”

“You hardly fade with consumption, Henry.” John interjected quietly. Henry turned to the pointed gaze, and pulled up short, then nodded and waved a hand dismissively. “Alright, he didn’t want to die hacking his lungs up—”

“Oh,  _Henry_.” John pursed his lips.

The slightly younger man looked chastised. “Okay,  _okay_  – he didn’t want to die like  _that_ , so he jumped overboard, and got all his men to say that’s what happened. Anyone can see that.”

John raised a dark eyebrow over his own drink. “And why would a quarter of a crew risk court martial by relating the story we just heard, if it was a lie?”

Henry paused. “Well he...probably left them all his money in his will.” He nodded, pleased with that, and reached for his drink again.

“Ah, well that’s where you’re wrong,” Richard said, triumphantly, leaning back too and folding his long arms. “’Cause there  _was_  no will.”

Henry stopped. “What?”

“It’s true. Nothing. See, there was no body found, obviously, and they never found a will among his things. Wasn’t stolen, neither – nothing was touched in his house. An’ besides, only the Governor and two Lieutenants on Norrington’s ship already knew he had it – not even that lady he was going to marry at one point knew, and she was the Governor’s  _daughter_. And Sparrow – well he never came  _near_  Port Royal or any Navy men again.”

“Well...” Henry sucked his lip. “What about those others, then – the Turners, wasn’t it?” He nodded conspiratorily, slapped a hand on his thigh and started nodding again. “Yeah, bet they got it.  _Bet_  they scarpered back to England or something just after and got a nice big house, didn’t they?”

John chuckled. “Henry, even  _I_  know they still live in Port Royal.” 

“What?” He looked back and forth between his two friends, the pub candlelight reflected in his glasses. “This was nearly twenty-five years ago – you don’t really believe Sparrow would do that?”

John nodded. “I do.” Richard grinned across the table.

He spluttered. “But...oh come ON! Sparrow took him off and killed him – the whole thing’s shite!”

“Actually...” Someone had stopped by their table, and interrupted in an exaggeratedly low voice. They all looked up to a round face, topped with dark hair.

“Mullroy.” Richard narrowed his eyes. “What do you know?”

Thomas Mullroy glanced round, then shuffled onto the seat next to Richard, pushing him along with his substantial arse. Putting his own drink on the table, he leaned in, and lowered his voice eve more. “Some say…” He paused for effect.

Henry, Richard, and finally even John bent their heads in too. “What?”

He continued to be dramatic for a moment, quivering. Richard sighed loudly and poked him. “Some say  _what_?”

Shuffling excitedly, Thomas breathed, “ _Some_  say Sparrow and Norrington were…together. You know.” He gestured a bit. “Like that.”

Richard stilled. Henry’s eyes widened and he sat up very straight. “ _Never_!”

“Mm-hm.” Thomas nodded fervently at him. “Else how would he know about that consumpshin?”

“Well., ‘cause he...was Captain Jack Sparrow!”

“Erm, yeah, but ‘e wasn’t a mind reader!”

Richard turned to Thomas, talking over Henry’s attempt at a reply. “Do  _they_  say anything else?”

Thomas took a drink for this bit, wiped his mouth hurriedly. “They  _say_ , that when Sparrow found out ‘bout the consumptshin he couldn’t bear to lose his— er, his, er, Norrington, so he got him to take a bit of that cursed Aztec gold. You know, from the thing with the other crew of the  _Black Pearl_  my dad was in, I mean you all know that – and yeah, so Sparrow got him to take a bit so the consumptshin couldn’t get him, and o’course neither could anything else. So he might just still be off somewhere. Undead, like.”

Richard blinked. Henry whistled, agog. Then he shook his fair head. “No, NO, this is bloody stupid.”

John cleared his throat. “Ah, actually, I heard about the gold, as well.”

Whirling, Thomas squeaked a little, mouth dropping open. “You knew about that already?” He looked incredibly disappointed. John smiled, a little. “Yes – just a whisper. However, the version I heard said Norrington didn’t take the gold.”

“There’s different  _versions_?!” And he just looked annoyed, now. Richard, glancing at him, swallowed and managed to overcome his shock enough to chuckle.

“It’s no surprise, Thomas. It  _is_  legend.” John said. He rested his chin in one pale hand and began gesturing languidly with the other; his classic ‘explaining something’ pose. 

And oh, yep.

“People are always changing legends and stories,” he continued. “I mean, when you tell something, you temper it according to your audience and your own preference – no, don’t shake your head Thomas, you do.” John might have been a little drunk, blinking that slowly, but as always he kept his head, and the clear, low voice that captivated people as he spoke. “Be it exaggeration, or just leaving something out, you’ll find most stories will all be the same up to one point and then it’ll get changed.” 

Henry was nodding as slowly as John’s blinking. Then he stopped. “But, nah – no-one in their right mind’d take a bit of that gold. You’d be cursed.” He looked about. “Surely Norrin’ton’d rather have died naturally?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in the Aztec story,” John said, turning to him. Henry coughed. “Well, I..don’t.”

Thomas did his best to appear stern. “Are you calling my father a liar?”

“I...oh alright  _fine_ , I might just believe the bit from the first time round. The  _Black Pearl_  things.”

Immediately, Thomas changed expression. His eyes gleamed. “Hoo, you want to see my father’s scars from those fights.”

“Yes, I’m sure we’ll all look forward to the sight of your father’s hairy belly, if we ever do meet him,” John said, straight faced. Thomas scowled and flicked foam at them all when they laughed, then, looking round, leaned in again. “There’s more, y’know.” 

He waited for them to lean in as well. 

Richard sighed and punched him in the arm. “Just bloody tell it, would you?”

Rubbing his arm furiously, he glared. “Alright! Bleedin’ christ … No, see, my Da’? He was on the  _Dauntless_  when they caught Sparrow, up in Cuba.” He took the pause as positive. “ _Yeah_. He was the night guard Sparrow knocked out, night he escaped.”

“Bollocks,” Henry and Richard said simultaneously. They looked at each other, surprised, then Richard smiled brightly and clinked their pints together. Thomas frowned at them. “Yeah yeah, think what you want, it’s true. And he says when he came down to take the post – ay, he’d helped Norrington the first time he met Sparrow, you know. Maybe that’s why he was sent, knew he could be trusted with him –  _and_ he knew the Turners too—”

“ _Thomas_ …” John warned.

“Oh  _alright_. Where was—yeah. Got down, and Norrington was there. And he and Sparrow were all...chatty.”

“It  _would_  be his job to interrogate the prisoner,” John pointed out.

“Yeah,” Thomas said, turning to him, “but not for hours an’ hours.”

There was another pause. Thomas was known for his ability to tell brilliant stories – wonderful for long days, but now…

“Oh fine, okay, forget that bit if you will then,” Thomas said, rolling his eyes and rubbing his arm again. “But what do you think about the gold?”

John gestured over their heads to the bar for another round. “What about it?” he said, lowering his arm.

“Well, would you have taken it?” Thomas continued, looking round at them.

John went to reply, and stopped. Frowned. “...No.” He tested his answer, then nodded. “No, I wouldn’t. I can’t think that it could possibly be worth it.” He looked to Richard. “What about you?”

Richard licked his lips, and then nodded tightly, dark curls bobbing. “Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

John tilted his head in surprise. “Really?”

He shrugged. “Mm. I…think it could be worth it. For— for love. Or something.”

“You mean you...you would  _willingly_  be  _undead_? Willingly give up sensations, for that?”

Richard started to glare, mouth tightening to a thin line. “I just..well it...it beats consumption, doesn’t it?” he snapped.

Blinking at the outburst, John nevertheless pressed on. “And being a walking bunch of bones without proper feelings is better?”

“Well, no, but— but  _love_ , that wouldn’t fade, would it?”

Richard turned sideways first, the other two following a second after.

Henry.

He was speaking apparently to himself, swirling the dregs of the pint he was staring at with one finger distractedly, a lock of hair falling over the frame of his glasses. “I mean, that’s not like a…a physical feeling, not completely, is it? So even if you _were_  cursed, you’d still be able to be in love and…and be with the one you loved.” He sat up, sucking the finger. “Yeah,  _yeah_ , so it—” Froze, finger in his mouth.

They were all staring at him.

His cheeks coloured immediately. Pulling the finger out with a pop, he set about glowering indignantly, but only really succeeded in looking petulant. 

Thomas snuffed a laugh, and grinned. “Ahhh, so you believe me about the gold, then.”

“I…it— look, ’m just sayin, is all!”

John leaned over and tapped Henry’s arm before he could get confrontational to cover his embarrassment, throwing a quick, warning look to Thomas. “Ignore that, Henry, just answer this. Which ending would  _you_  pick?”

Sucking the inside of his cheek as he thought, Henry sat back, and scratched his jaw. A little of the foam he’d missed from his finger spread along it, and Richard, noticing, sighed silently at the thought of how much he’d like to kiss it off.

He then licked his lips again nervously, lowered his head a little, and silently (but profusely) thanked the Lord who he hoped hadn’t damned him to hell anyway, that he  _could_  hold his thoughts, unlike the passionate object of his affections.

Shrugging broad shoulders, Henry finally answered. “I dunno. I  _think_  taking it – just for a little bit, maybe. But…well, I’ve never been in love like that.”

Thomas started to snigger at him, then stopped suddenly. Looked down at his drink, jowls dropping. “No. Me neither.”

Richard smiled softly at the table, and then nudged him after a pause. “So, how about you then? Which ending for you?”

He lifted his head. “You mean like, would I have taken it?”

They nodded as one.

“Not a chance in hell,” he snorted. “…Which is kind of the point, is it not?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

**the mistake of thinking**

“Jack?”

“Mm?”

“Why, exactly, did you feel the need to knock me out and steal me from my own ship and crew?”

“…You’re only just thinking ‘bout this?”

“Forgive me, I have been  _somewhat_  distracted.”

Jack paused at that, turning slightly and feeling his cot rock gently under him, distant noises of his crew outside drifting in. James shifted against his side. “Right, good point.”

“I mean, you could have just told me what you planned to do.”

“And have you just say no straight off? I’ve always found it best to actually see things, first. People need t’be a bit more… _visual_  in their decisions sometimes, love. Then you really  _know_.”

James pushed himself up onto one elbow and looked at him, the room quite dark with no candles even though it was only early afternoon. “What, did you think I’d be overcome with some hidden pirate lust for the gold?”

“…Was hopin’ it’d be more for me, actually.”

Smiling gently, James kissed the side of Jack’s jaw in answer. Jack turned his head to catch his mouth, dropping an arm to tug him further onto his chest and enjoy the weight as they kissed, James still a little tentative and Jack gentle with him. When they broke apart, James sighed, brushing fingers over Jack’s high cheeks and moustache much as had been done to him, then lay his head down again, brushing Jack’s hair away to push his face into the groove of his shoulder and neck, where he’d explained the scent of him was the strongest. James inhaled very deeply and carefully, and lay quiet.

Jack listened to his breathing, feeling the slow rise and fall of the chest against him, and watched the hanging at the foot of the bed moving slightly with the ship as James drifted to sleep.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**i serve others, not only myself**  
  
His jerk backwards makes him dizzy, which makes him stagger, and he clutches the sides of the chest for balance. Jack reaches over the gold to grab his collar and help, but he is struggling to think clearly as it is. “Take one of  _these_?” he gasps, the gravity of it overwhelming. Jack nods, once, and James splutters in surprise. He shakes his head. “I can’t, I... I would–”  
  
“– _not_  be dyin’ anymore.”  
  
He shuts his mouth. Swallows, thickly. The blood that constantly seems to linger deep in his throat is perfect; just the flavour of the bitterness he feels. Oh unfair,  _unfair_ , to put this forward.   
  
“Yes – and who, exactly, would I be taking it for?” he asks, wrenching back out of Jack’s grip. “Myself? …Or you?”  
  
“What does it matter?”  
  
“It.  _Matters_.” he grinds out. His fingernails scrape the stone as he digs them in.  
  
“Well then, yes – yes, it is a bit for me. But it’s for you as well – it would be for  _both_  of us, an’ that’s the point.” Jack folds his arms as if that is all he needs to say.  
  
“But...how can you possibly think that  _this_ —” James gestures violently across the cold gold, “—is the solution?!”  
  
“It’d stop you from bein’  _sick_.” Jack tilts his head incredulously at him. “Don’t you want to live?”  
  
“Oh, no, absolutely not. In fact I’m very much looking forward to choking on frothy red foam in my lungs. Of  _course_  I do!” The raising of his voice makes him cough again, actually, which isn’t amusing in the slightest. Hoarse-throated, he has to stop for a moment. Jack watches him as he calms himself.  
  
“...Y’don’t want me, then?”  
  
“ _What_?” His head jerks up, mouth dropping open; wheezes, stutters, repeats himself. “I...I do. Of course I do.”  
  
Jack slips around the chest to stand next to him. “So take one.”   
  
“ _Jack_. It’s not… It really isn’t that simple.”  
  
“’Course it is.”   
  
“How?!”   
  
“Because. I love you, an’ I’d really rather you didn’t up and die on me. Savvy?” Jack shrugs as he says it, calm in that feeling, and James’s ribs must have cracked open since his heart just thumped so hard.   
  
As he’s struggling with how to respond, Jack runs his palms up over James’s arms to cup his slack jaw with both hands. “Now, listen. I know this is... I...bugger it I’m  _not_  just going t’sit an’ watch you die. That would be one of the things I cannot do. I’d give you  _my_  blood if you wanted it, to have you, but we both know I can’t do that either, only I— _want_  you. An’ if I’m not as blind as I have been ‘til now I’d wager you want me too.” He shrugs, very gently, shakes his head. “This is the  _only way_  t’get that, James.”  
  
“I...” He stares. “Jack, I...I  _cannot_.”  
  
“I know, I know. Doesn’t make sense, none of it.” Jack smiles sadly, strokes his thumbs over James’s cheeks. His palm guard is still damp, his ring very cold. “You getting sick,” he continues, “– you n’ me, really; us here; taking the gold... But, what you need t’decide, Commodore, is which is  _worse_.”   
  
James is still. Still breathing. He stumbles over what to say.   
  
There is plenty to think, however, that much is clear. That even though coming from somebody meant to order, meant to steal, this is a request. For Jack, as much as him.   
  
Oh God it  _is_  unfair, all of it is. And the mere  _thought_  is absolute insanity – he’s seen what these coins do. Seen men driven to dropping their weapons just for a few days of life, heard the muttered words of _curse_  and  _gods_ , the talk of sensation returning with a rush like quicksilver and the hollow chill inside your bones before.   
  
But he... but is it ridiculous to be more scared of dying  _now_ , than the thought of seeing his own skeleton? The ones he saw were horrific, but so is coughing up and tasting the inside of his lungs. He’s already losing his appetite, already wakes in cold sweats at night – what somehow scares him more is the loss he’d felt when he’d thought that Jack was gone. That it was finished.  
  
And the other things. The ones he hadn’t let himself consider, yet.   
  
What would happen after. What  _he_  might have done. The thought of Jack caught by some other man, and creaking rope and beads clacking dully together long after the sound of bootheels scraping wood has died away.   
  
Jack presses his face behind James’s ear and makes him shiver. “Jus’ take it for a little bit,” he says, and it’s a soft tumble of words bumping into and tumbling down over James’s neck so quietly that he almost misses them. “Only a little bit.”   
  
Jack moves back suddenly, rubs his hands briskly up and down the tops of James’s arms to warm him up in the chilly cave, glances up and down and then back up again. Echoes of their conversation bounce around them, muffled and stretched and being absorbed into the water lapping at the entrance, and James feels bruised in every way that a person could be.   
  
“Please.” Jack asks, only doesn't, hesitating.   
  
James is still. Still breathing.   
  
But he stops stumbling over what to say.  
  
If anybody ever finds out, he could lie. Explain that he was forced into it, he had no choice, and try to save corrupting the image of himself as a man willing to stare down death until the end.   
  
The only problem he has with this argument, of course, is that only this pirate, his best friends and one old man know that he is dying – and since they didn’t… _don’t_ , expect anything like that of him, the only one he feels that he is letting down now...is himself.  
  
This is selfish. On both parts. Reckless, rash, bound to turn out badly – and yet, there is an offer in it as well. Some kind of promise, some kind of thing that will tie them as he’s  _wanted_  to be tied. Damn it he is dying, and he’s terrified, and now he has found something that he wants more than anything on either the oceans or the land. He is not ready to give that up yet.   
  
That’s not so terrible, is it? It cannot be greed – he doesn’t want anything more than  _this_.   
  
What will the gods say to that, he wonders.  
  
At least he could tell them that he did it for someone else, as well.  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 **i would rather**  
  
His jerk backwards makes him dizzy, which makes him stagger, and he clutches the sides of the chest for balance. Jack reaches over the gold to grab his collar and help, but he is struggling to think clearly as it is. “Take one of  _these_?” he gasps, the gravity of it overwhelming. Jack nods, once, and James splutters in surprise. He shakes his head. “I can’t, I... I would–”  
  
“– _not_  be dyin’ anymore.”  
  
He shuts his mouth. Swallows, thickly. The blood that constantly seems to linger deep in his throat is perfect; just the flavour of the bitterness he feels. Oh unfair,  _unfair_ , to put this forward.   
  
“Yes, that’s correct,” he says. “I would simply  _be_  dead. Or, undead, or cursed, or whatever the bloody hell you want to call it— Jack, you...you don’t know what you’re saying. This is utterly  _insane_.”   
  
Jack gestures to himself. “Not exactly known for me sanity, am I?”  
  
“Don’t say that to me,” he snaps, tugging backwards. Jack snags him back and  _pulls_. “Do you  _want_  t’die?” he grinds out, suddenly fierce. “Are you looking forward to it, or something? Didn’t look too happy about it when you told me. In fact, you didn’t bloody look at all, save at the floor.”  
  
“And what exactly is it that you see, when you imagine this?” he asks. “The same meeting up as before? I go back to my post and pretend that everything is...is  _fine_? We continue to snatch time at night or early morning? I would be a  _skeleton_  in the moonlight, Jack, I’d...I’d have to leave the Navy—”  
  
“Hadn’t you done that already?” Jack interjects quietly.  
  
He goes still, expression dangerous, holding himself carefully because of his lungs, but  _tense_. “You know that is besides the point.”  
  
Visibly, Jack stops himself from snapping back – he lets go of James’s jacket and rolls his fingers, drops his arm. “It’s not about your  _career_ , James,” he says, quieter now. “It’s about you.”  
  
James sets his jaw. “Yes, it is. It is about the fact that I...I would be a  _skeleton_ , and you wouldn’t...you’d—”  
  
“Ohhhh, so  _that’s_  it. You think I wouldn’t want you.” He goes to protest that, well, sort of, but  _actually_ — except Jack throws his hands up and suddenly is  _there_ ; around the chest and flush to James and kissing him, turning him, pressing him back against the stone and swallowing his next words. James almost braces himself for another crack across the head when he pulls away, but Jack just settles a hand on his waist, cocks his head slightly to halt James’s protests and says ”I know you fell in love with me as well, James Norrington. Now stop trying t’put me off. It’s not goin’ to work.”  
  
His mouth throbs harder for a second, and parts in shock. He stops blinking, goes to answer but finds his chest tight again, catches his breath badly somewhere in the middle and has to drop his head to cough instead. Jack rubs his thumb in soothing circles over the nape of his neck, not letting up until James shakes his head free.  
  
“I...” He stops, and looks at Jack a moment before continuing. “No. I won’t do it. I’m sorry.”  
  
Jack’s face hardens. He takes a step backward, frowning. “…You don’t make any sense. Do y’know that?”  
  
“I would if you would let me explain—“  
  
“You can’t want to just die. It’s  _not_  your time. ‘Specially  _now_ , when we...” His back has hit the chest and can’t go any further, but he doesn’t look like he minds – steps in again, in fact. “ _want_  you, James. I want you and—“   
  
“I know.” James doesn’t usually interrupt but he has to. “I...want you, as well, but you see that’s...” He glances down at the gold again, then back. “That’s the point.” He clears his throat again and reaches out carefully, links two of his fingers with Jack’s and lifts his hand slowly. He turns it over and looks at it; the wear, the marks and rough sections, the dirt rubbed into the lines on the palm. Rubs his thumb over the centre, then curls his fingers over Jack’s wrist and explains.   
  
“I won’t take it because I would rather be with you properly than as a...I don’t know, a shadow of myself. If I cannot have you fully,  _really_ , have  _this_ ,” He lifts Jack’s hand as he’s talking, kisses the back, presses it to his cheek again, “ _feel_  this properly...then that would simply be worse than anything this illness will do.”  
  
Jack swallows. “…Already cursed.”   
  
James holds his gaze as he turns his head to breathe in the salt of the damp palm guard, nods. “I don’t need another one. We already have something hanging over this, I mean I  _already_  knew it was going to end. Although it...it was probably always doomed—“  
  
Jack moves at that – flexes his hand, hisses, low. “It  _wasn’t_. Isn’t. Don’t say that. Not this.” He tightens his hold on James, steps in again – it’s like a bloody dance, this back and forth, though far less entertaining. “It might not make a lot of sense but that’s not a bad thing.”   
  
“Alright.” He smiles, slightly. “I know. But even so – no, no  _because_  of that, I can’t take a piece. I’ll not do it, even…even to stay with you. For this. And I  _know_ , it’s unfair, you don’t need to tell  _me_. I know. It’s bloody unfair, and of course the worst bit of all is I—” He cuts himself off, literally bites his tongue, but then sod it he will not, cannot stop the trembling rush of words, and he voices what is the hardest and yet easiest and most obvious thing of all.   
  
“…The worst bit is, for this, I  _would_.” He presses his lips together, bites the inside of his cheek, goes to wrap his arms around Jack or perhaps to kiss him, or push him, hold him or be held, just something, but instead his knee folds in and he gives up and lets go of Jack to get a grip on the chest and keep himself somewhat upright as he sits down very suddenly. Finishes in a somewhat ungainly stance from the floor. “The most laughable thing, is that I really, really  _want_  to.”  
  
Jack doesn’t bend down next to him, at first. James stares at one of his boots for a minute, then leans back against the cool stone of the chest, closes his eyes and tries to calm his hammering chest.  
  
The sea is sucking quietly around the entrance to the cave. He’s only just noticed that, the washing gently back and forth over the stones.   
  
Finally, Jack crouches down next to him, slides his back down the chest and stretches his legs out, until he can cross them at the ankles. His sword scrapes along the floor and his beads clack against the stone, but he doesn’t actually say any words. Just sits, one shoulder against James’s.  
  
They stay side by side silently for a while. The sun warms the tops of James’s ears, the bridge of his nose. Behind his eyelids the orangewhitegold seeps in and though it’s warm, and brilliant, beautiful, his eyes still prickle and sting. Then Jack clears his throat and he opens them to the glow.  
  
“I just did somethin’ really...stupid, didn’t I?” he murmurs.   
  
James turns his head into the shadow thrown by his face.  _Jack Sparrow_  actually looks a little pale, licking his lips when he turns as well. He rests his chin on Jack’s shoulder, and has to smile. Twisted, but real.  
  
“Yes.” The composure in his voice is probably impressive, but something else is faltering – his bottom lip, again, his eyes, his hands. He drops his head onto Jack’s shoulder, sun back on his face, presses it up under Jack’s jaw. “Thankyou.”   
  
Jack takes a breath, and reaches for him. Hauls him into his lap, and kisses his hair.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**on your feet**  
  
He picks from the very top. Most of the tightness in his body snaps off like a string has been cut, and he puts the coin into the pocket of his breeches – it pulls on the fabric, then gets lost in the folds, and he changes his mind. Slips it between his skin and the waistband, so he can know for sure it’s there.   
  
They put the lid back on the chest and push it from the platform and down against the wall, away from easy view as best they can. It ought to be fine, since everyone who knows the location of the Isle is dead or worki— worked, for him. It’s just in case.   
  
The coin starts to rub against his hipbone when Jack takes his hand and leads him back to the jollyboat.   
  
They row back to the  _Pearl_  in the early sun; James insisting he take the oars, Jack watching, feet between James’s. He touches the reflection of the water playing over James’s jaw and cheek, brushes his knee. James inclines his head towards the  _Pearl_ , where someone is gesturing for a signal from Jack, but nudges Jack’s boot with the toe of one of his own just before he turns. Smiles, a bit.  _I’m alright_.  
  
On the ship there is a surprise – one Joshamee Gibbs, formerly of his Majesty’s Navy but now, apparently, a pirate, waiting in front of a crew who have clearly paused in their duties when James climbs over the wales behind Jack. He knew the man had been discharged from the Navy, but this he did not quite expect; he slips an arm behind his back automatically as he straightens. Realises what he’s done and tenses, but holds.   
  
Gibbs is turned to Jack though, setting back on the  _Pearl_  and tugging his sash straight, throwing a look back over the side as though accusing the ropes of attempting to have their way with him. He nods at Gibbs though, and Gibbs’s eyebrows lift for a second, smoothing some of the lines around his eyes and making him appear more like the sailor James knew – then he nods back, and at James. Smiles, suddenly, extends a grubby hand which James shakes, then launches into a quick run down of the weather and the situation of the crew.   
  
He moves easily and grins into well-worn grooves. James wonders at how someone could switch so entirely, become something they were so vitriolic towards before. Then a man with a parrot on his shoulder makes to pass, and he and Jack step together to make the room, instead of apart.   
  
While he’s looking at Jack, Jack slips an arm about his waist, drawing soft circles over his ribs, and gives him a little nudge towards the cabin. Shouts orders over his shoulder to the crew as they go, to sail the  _Pearl_  as quick and quiet as she’ll go back into Port Royal.   
  
James needs to get a few things.   
  
The day is one of shimmering heat, golden edges on the window frames and sails that are far softer than the ones against his skin. The hours pass in a disjointed manner, the crew having each given him a quiet acknowledgement as they passed, the cabin familiar once they enter its cool interior. He feels less sore, more...awake than he has been for weeks. The pain in his head also dulls quickly, though it was never a distraction.   
  
He wants to know what happened on his ship.   
  
Jack walks the cabin floor three times as he tells it (and it’s a big cabin), while James sits on the cot. He shrugs his coat and hat off while he speaks and throws them without even looking to land draped over the back of the ornate chair at the table; fiddles with his gun belt and then hooks it over the door, runs fingers over the sides of books on a little desk. When he explains about Theodore he comes to a momentary halt, glancing at James, then sets off again, reaching up to ripple his fingers through the (new) hanging chime of what appears to be hollowed bamboo wood, disturbing the gentle rhythm to one that is more like the pace James’s heart is going at.   
  
When Jack passes the cot the third time, he is finished. He pivots towards the table to get a drink from the bottle on it – James reaches out and catches him, pulls him back to sit next to him.  
  
He is sad, for not being able to say goodbye, but he’d not wanted to do it in the first place. And what Jack did is…well. Possibly one of the most wonderful things that anyone has ever tried to do for him, though that sounds like a completely ludicrous notion. He isn’t sure, it might need thought.   
  
But mostly, it is  _Jack_. And that’ll do.  
  
“You realise the entire Royal Navy is now going to be under orders to capture and most likely cripple or shoot you on sight,” he does point out.  
  
Jack nods. “We’ll be makin’ a point of steering well clear.”  
  
“…We.”  
  
Jack kisses him, hard. “Aye.”   
  
Laying back on his elbows, Jack starts kicking off his boots. James, with his longer legs, pushes off the floor with his own, making the cot swing gently. “It’s for the best,” he finally agrees. “But do you think... Do you think that we might see them again? Or that I might be able to contact Theodore? Even Anthony?" He pinches the bridge of his nose. "What about my father, Jack?”   
  
Jack does that thing where he just looks at him, again. “That one’s up t’you, James L.”  
  
He can feel the coin against his skin: hard, and not cold, just cool, though perhaps it is starting to warm up – unless he is starting to cool down, and “Will I age?” he asks suddenly. “Or just…stop?” He wasn’t going to mention anything, but now he does, unplanned. “What if I start to lose feeling, Jack? If I—”  
  
Jack leans up and stops him partway with another kiss. Smoothes a hand under his thigh, impelling him round, pushes him gently back onto the cot. He strips James quickly of his jacket and shirt, kissing him, encouraging him when James shudders and untenses and bites at his lip, grasps at his hair. Pulls his own clothes off, drops their shirts over the edge at the same time, nudges James’s head up with his nose and blows a puff of air on his neck as they’re both tugging at the buttons on his breeches, earning a little huff back; pulls off James’s stockings and shoes once he is bare.   
  
He is dark, gold water, bonewhite and coarse black over his headband that is not so strong a colour as to be more attention grabbing than his  _eyes_ ; tar and earth and wood grain and silver on his hands. He is straight edges and angles that turn to curves, he is slim waist sharp hips, he is splashed and stabbed with ink and weapons and mapped with scars and colours wherever James has looked and licked and touched; rivers on one forearm, waves on one thigh, sun and shapes and sails and a smile. And he is with James. He is with James.   
  
“Beautiful,” he says, kissing over his heart, and James gasps because he hadn’t meant to say it, and he hadn’t, it was Jack. Popping the front of James’s breeches, Jack slips his hands inside to tug them off, still talking something to him.   
  
Stops only when the coin hits the floor, rolling after a thunk, ending on a clatter.   
  
Sitting up, tangled together, they look down at it next to the cot. The face looks back, empty eye sockets and a hollow grin, and when Jack pulls James’s face away and nudges him back down again, laying flat along his body and capturing his lips once more, it continues to watch.   
  
He is all warm skin and the tiniest tremors running across his shoulderblades, under James’s palms. James opens, holds him back, twists their legs together and rolls them; kisses Jack’s chin, his hands, scrapes his bottom teeth over one nipple, wetly mouths the underside of Jack’s cock. Jack arches under him like liquid, murmuring as he tangles his hands in James’s hair, then taps his nails lightly on James’s scalp to warn him and rises up once over again – they are changing balance, the two of them swapping, tipping back and forth, until a still moment Jack creates when he ducks his head to suck away the tangy trace of gold from James’s hip. Replaces it with his own type of mark, an ache of pinky-red like the flush dusting down James’s chest.  
  
It’s a statement, in his manner.  _This one’s mine, not yours_ , he tells the coin, then pushes his face into the dark crease of James’s thigh and breathes in. James pulls him up and finds his mouth with his own, clutches at Jack’s tattooed forearm and moves Jack’s hand between his legs to urge him in, dropping his head back only when Jack shifts back to curve the same hand under his knee, lifting it to his shoulder.  
  
Later, after they have slept, James wakes up first. He lays by Jack a moment in the evening quiet, thinking (about his ship, his friends, and the shades of blue grey playing over Jack’s face), then shimmies down to kiss the matching bruises on Jack’s knees.  
  
They hide the  _Pearl_  in a bay one around from the Port, just as night drops in. It’s cloudy when they come out on deck, obscuring the half moon; Jack looks up and scowls, rolls his eyes at James. The gods are, apparently, being wary. Or torturous gits, one of the two.  
  
Jack follows James as they slip into his house, and watches him carefully take nothing obvious. He wishes, as he had when they’d actually met up here, that he had time to poke about properly, but the things that really tell James’s story are the ones he takes anyway. An old but sharp sword from under the loose floorboard in his bedroom (he’d  _thought_  he’d heard it creak when he’d padded barefoot across to the basin to get a washcloth), a few letters from the bedside drawer, including one he recognises his own handwriting on, and smiles; two books. An old silver earring unwrapped from a cloth, tucked away in the cupboard.   
  
James can’t touch his money, clearly, someone would know. He does go to his study, however. In the squat desk at the back of the room he unlocks one drawer, and removes his will.   
  
The moon chooses the moment when he is crossing the room again, to come out. Two steps past the window and opal suddenly streams through the frame, spilling across the edge of the desk. James stops mid-step, and turns.   
  
Pushing off the doorway he was leaning on, Jack moves up behind him as he stands on the edge of the shadow. He puts a hand on James’s waist and goes up on tiptoes slightly so as to rest his chin on his shoulder, watching together when James stretches the document out into the silvery light.   
  
Nothing happens to the pages, but his hands ruffle like the paper should. The skin ripples away to leave the bone, hard white fingers in a stark contrast to the swirling black signature on the top page. (Jack notes that the clauses aren’t even finished, but James signed it already. He wants to burn the thing.)   
  
There seems to be no flesh, just the bone, and the blue cuff of James's coat fading and tattering a little on the edges up to where the shadow meets it. That bit is the oddest thing of all. James would never let that happen to his clothing.  
  
There’s a tiny crack in the index finger knuckle.   
  
“How’d y’do that?” Jack asks, nodding towards it.  
  
James is silent for a moment more, then answers, quietly. “…My first day as a Lieutenant.” He twists his hand slightly, staring. “Theodore got so flustered trying not to say anything wrong that he…” He clears his throat. “He dropped a cannon ball on my hand.”   
  
Jack snorts softly. Smoothes his lips over James’s neck, reaches out, and pockets the pages for him.   
  
The moon disappears again.   
  
James thinks about leaving something for his friends, especially Theo. His family are in his mind as well, have been all week, but then, it is just his father and William now. It’d be easier for them to hear of him snatched, to think of him as killed by an enemy, than an illness. And he is aware that the house will be looked through, not to mention that he cannot think of anything specific enough. At least his friends knew already, before Jack announced it to his ship.   
  
He thinks that’s the best thing he could have given them anyway.  
  
He leads Jack through the deserted streets, the only light from under a few doors, one hand straying occasionally to the bump in his waistband. Jack catches it and laces the fingers with his own, tugs him in to kiss him in the middle of the main street. He pulls back and twirls with a flourish, ducking James’s attempts to shush him, and when their path takes them around the edge of the town, near the Fort, exaggeratedly tiptoes past the entrance to it. James sees what he is doing and he’s grateful, on top of being a smidge amused and on the verge of irritation; he presses Jack into an almost pitch black spot of shadow and thoroughly kisses him against the wall to shut him up.   
  
These are not bad things.  
  
By the waterfront, Jack produces a yellow scarf from his pocket and ties it around a palm. It’s a message for Will, he says. Which means Elizabeth will get it too, being Elizabeth, and James is eased a touch by that. They’re going to miss the wedding. It’s the next Saturday.   
  
And then, after the lifting of the anchor, (once) Commodore James Norrington sails on the  _Black Pearl_.  
  
They head away from Port Royal, planning to go up past Cuba and skirt Mexico, perhaps cross to lower American shores. Stay out of sight. For a while it seems more a simple sailing vessel than a pirate ship – the priority is to keep their heads down, not steal goods, and the rich haul in the belly of the  _Pearl_  enables them to journey without paying much attention to what they pass. This is a relief to James – he knows that Jack would not have rubbed his nose in it or anything similar, but occasionally he still finds himself looking up at the dark sails and shaking his head.   
  
He had expected, somehow, that certain things would stop straight away, since the other effect of the curse was immediate, that the illness seemed to simply…cease. (This most of all was a relief – he had been so worried about passing it to someone else that even now it makes him swallow to think of it. Though either way, of course, it seems that Jack would not have gone anywhere. For which he is so overwhelmed he does not think he could word it, still stunned, and breathless, and annoyed that Jack might risk himself.)   
  
Yet what he finds instead, in a somewhat incredulous manner, is that not a lot has changed, apart from him feeling generally  _well_  again. He still sweats, still gets giddy if he doesn’t drink enough when they’re sailing, is still able to taste the rum burning sharp in his mouth and Jack’s. Can get  _drunk_ , even, and get hungry and eat too much; piss, shit (no call for niceties in speech, on a pirate ship), come (thank God. Or,  _the_  Gods) – and, after all of that, he still tans.   
  
 _Tans_.   
  
This is  _not_  quite like normal (not that he ever darkened much at all – was wont to burn if he weren’t careful, in fact), though: he can be darker at the end of one day than he was at the beginning, but by the next he will be back to the original shade. Nonetheless, Jack delights in the line on his forearms where he has rolled his sleeves up, and some days later, the one across the base of his spine when the air gets closer to the skin and the shirts much further away.   
  
One  _hot_  mid-day in the Gulf, Moises suggests to Anamaria that she do the same. Her lips thin when she punches him, and just before she takes her place at the helm, she lifts her sweaty hair from her shoulders instead, knotting a bit of twine around it.   
  
Amongst the men, the sudden grace of her neck is shocking. She glares when she catches James looking, but he just smiles a little, leaning back against the side of the  _Pearl_  and folding his arms.   
  
Jack joins them then, landing catlike from the rigging to see what all the noise is about. He’s shirtless too, but still wearing his bloody sash, and practically as brown as a conker on the tops of his bare feet and forearms, across his sweaty back. He chuckles at the somewhat cross-eyed Moises and looks for James; spots him and, scratching his side, crosses to him, calling to Anamaria. Tells her she shouldn’t have something that ugly in her lovely hair – the  _Pearl_  wouldn’t be happy with her sails tied with something that rough, would she?   
  
“Ere—“ he motions to James, turning round, and directs him in unwinding the bit of bone from his hair. When he’s got it, he sways over to her, holding it high as he climbs the stairs. James leans back again, crossing one ankle over the other, and watches as he shows it to Anamaria very. seriously.   
  
“Do  _not_  lose this,” Jack says, and slips behind her. She doesn’t jump, keeps her chin high as he tackles the twine with gusto, something James suspects she always would in any situation, but she is wary, watching him out of the corners of her eyes. Jack unties the twine and lets the wind steal it, then twists the thick locks up tight against her head and pushes the bone through them.   
  
It holds.   
  
He grins at her, and announces to the ship that there is a  _lot_  to be learned from women  _if_  men would only take the time.   
  
Gibbs is muttering under his breath when he trudges past James, nearly treading on his toes he’s so absorbed in it, and Anamaria narrows her eyes at Jack, unsure if he is mocking her or not.   
  
But leaves it in.  
  
The moon has got fatter the longer they have been sailing. James keeps off deck at night for the first week, and Jack doesn’t say anything about it, just runs fingers over his shoulder and down across his back with a smile when he passes, then turns back to face the setting sun which collects thickly around the buckles on his belt and the metal in his hair.   
  
The eve of his 12th day on board, however, land is just dipping out of sight over the horizon to port while the sun goes the other way, and James stays sat near the bowsprit, sharpening his old blade on a barrel with the sails and the crew whispering behind him. This evening the sky stretches purple up to black over a sea flat like a mirror, the moon will be nearly full, and he put off the acceptance of that nagging worry at not feeling completely past the first illness for too long.   
  
Most of the crew go in for supper, a few remaining. Jack was taken off by a muttering Marty to see what the cook was up to now (the diminutive pirate had turned quite the affronted connoisseur at the salted bread the night before), and so James is almost alone when the moon becomes all that’s left in the sky. He pushes another strong downward stroke, a second, and jumps.   
  
Finds he doesn’t need the water, after all – reflected in the line of highly polished metal is the bone of his jaw, bright and glowing under the moon.   
  
Carefully, he tilts the sword further around, and...looks.   
  
...Well, he always rather liked his nose but...at least the bone is very straight. He has all of his teeth, though everything there is so white that they are quite difficult to pick out, and oh, his cheeks look as high as Jack’s, like this. Well-worn sockets sit either side under his ears – still there, mostly, and his hair too, lifting in the breeze away from some flesh around his neck – which is not rotting, thank god, gods, somebody; not rotting, but not quite…there. His skin has faded out, blurred away and drawn back, and his collarbone slashes across the empty space inside the loose neck of his shirt.  
  
Jack is standing just over his shoulder.   
  
He swears, fingers jarring down the sword. Thinks it’s a bloody good thing he did take the coin, because he would have just sliced down to the bone were it not already visible.   
  
He glances behind him, then turns fully around. The movement pulls him partway from the light and half of his face…sighs, there’s no other word for it, it  _returns_. Quite honestly, that must be the single most unsettling thing he’s ever experienced, but there’s no time to dwell because Jack is crouching, looking up at him with his forearms on his knees.   
  
He just waits. He’s had good practise at this sort of scrutiny from Jack, by now.   
  
Jack tilts his head, eyes wide but calm; rocks back twice on his heels, making the beads in his hair click. The moonlight turns  _his_  skin to polished bronze, but James cannot ever, ever be envious of that.   
  
Reaching out, Jack brushes two fingertips James cannot feel along the undercurve of his eyesocket, across the bump of cheekbone. He lingers there, before dropping, runs along his jaw and under his chin, into the side that is in shadow and still warm. A smile takes Jack’s lips, and he twists his fingers into James's ponytail, dropping a kiss on his collarbone before standing up. His knees click.  
  
The coin grates against James’s hip when he stands as well, and follows Jack inside.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 **the ship is ours**  
  
They lift and push the lid back on together. It seems to hiss and close itself at the end, and James flinches back, though Jack doesn’t.  
  
Rowing back to the  _Pearl_  is difficult, but that’s mostly Jack’s fault; he steps into the jollyboat without removing his arm from around James’s waist and draws him to sit down on the same bench as him. Quite petulantly refuses to let go, and James, exasperated (and astonished and shaky and overwhelmed) picks up one oar, and Jack the other. After they’ve set off, as they row the short distance, he keeps nudging up under James’s ear. It takes a little while for them to get in time, but eventually they manage to travel in a (mostly) straight line.  
  
When they reach the  _Pearl_ , Jack climbs the wales next to him, helping him over. It’s quite alright until an older hand reaches out to help, and he understands who it is even as he comes to standing on the deck.  
  
“Ello, James,” Mr Gibbs says. Pirate Gibbs, that ought to be. James blinks, straightens, and Gibbs looks sideways at his Captain. Jack shakes his head once, and the majority of the crew, scattered around the ship and watching them, take a collective step back.   
  
Gibbs just looks back to James, one eye narrowed. Sucks his lip and starts to nod. “Right.”   
  
He extends a grubby hand, shakes James’s when he takes it warmly. He’s sweaty palmed and smells of salt and liquor, and then James realises that even alongside it there is the same, the bloody  _same_  smell of English fog he never lost all the way through the crossing to the Caribbean. It must be curled forever into those whiskers, and suddenly a sharp longing for England strikes him; a desire to feel that mist heavy on his skin again. Other things follow, as well they would, in a rush; the contrast found in the lightness of English morning air, worn cobbles underfoot, clock towers, fresh bread. Silver birch.   
  
He pulls himself back from dwelling, as Gibbs squeezes his hand briefly before letting it go, then claps Jack on the shoulder and starts a run down of the ship’s situation, reeling off the list of crew like he was born to do it.   
  
A man with a parrot on his shoulder stands aside when Jack nudges James towards his cabin, shouting orders to sail as quick as the  _Pearl_  will go back to Port Royal.  
  
James needs to get a few things.  
  
The cabin is cool inside, and he sits on the cot and has never been more thankful for Jack’s love of texture than when his aching limbs sink into the covers. Jack sheds his coat and gun belt and kicks off his boots, leaving them all in a pile on the floor, and climbs in to sit next to him – then closer, practically climbs  _onto_  him, in fact, crossing his legs over James’s. They look at each other for a moment.  
  
“Well then,” Jack says.  
  
“What happened on my ship?” James asks.  
  
Scratching his head up underneath the scarf, Jack sighs. He lays back on the mattress, and in between the gentle swings his movement makes he explains. Even at the beginning his hands go to idly play with James’s shirttails underneath his jacket, while he talks.   
  
James sighs back into the rough fingers when they dip into his waistband and brush across his hip; lies down next to Jack when he reaches the part about coming to James’s ship because…because he thought and wasn’t sure, and tenses when Theodore’s apparent gift for mysticism comes up.  
  
When Jack finishes, he glances sideways at the James. Then away, and down, makes to sit up. James curls a hand over his elbow and tugs him back, their sides pressed to each others’ from shoulder to the ankle of his shoes. He turns slightly, puts a hand carefully over Jack’s belt, rests his head on Jack’s shoulder.   
  
“You realise the entire Royal Navy is now going to be under orders to capture and most likely cripple or shoot you on sight,” he does point out.  
  
Jack rubs his knuckles over James’s lower back. “We’ll be makin’ a point of steering well clear.”  
  
He lifts his head. “…We?”  
  
Jack kisses him, gently. “Aye.” – but James pulls away. “I…no, Jack, I can’t stay here. I might make someone ill—“  
  
“I already  _told_  you that wasn’t somethin’ to worry about.”  
  
“I don’t mean you.” James goes up on one elbow. “Well, actually I  _do_ , but…”  
  
“Couldn’t prise me away if you tried.”  
  
“Mm.” He smiles a little, and stops, shakes his head softly then turns and lies on his back, looking at the ceiling. “We can’t ignore the crew though. You saw their reactions. Even had they not reacted in that manner, or were they to come around—“  
  
“They’ll not push you off my ship, James. If I want you here, you’re here.”  
  
“But I’m not even sure I want to be here, especially not if there’s a risk. If I made one of them ill I would never…” and oh. Right. He trails off, realising the slight ludicrousness of what he was about to say.  
  
“Never forgive yourself?” Jack leans up instead, grinning mostly humourlessly at him. “Aye, an’ here a year ago you’d have hung any one of us.”  
  
“I… That isn’t strictly true,” he insists. The mere thought of hurting Jack is making his heart flicker black and red, but what can he say? He  _is_  the Pirate Hunter, after all. He probably would have stretched even Gibbs’ neck, if he suspected him of piracy.  
  
But that does not mean that he was wrong. He gave trials. He did his hardest to be  _fair_ , and those that deserved it got justice. Since he is not actually in the Navy anymore, it probably oughtn’t be an issue, but the urge to protect people is not simply going to disappear.   
  
Yet here is this crew. And Jack, Jack is the issue. Jack was always different. Even right at the start, there had been that moment when he had floundered in his unexpected relief and confusion over what to do when Jack had gone over the wall, then grasping the opportunity to go against the rules because Jack did.  
  
He is…unusual, to say the least, as a pirate – though that’s not to say that James hasn’t dealt with a few others who called for a closer look, who had made him pause before. As, by the looks of things, this crew would. And for a moment, suddenly, it made him angry; angry that it couldn’t just be simple, that they couldn’t be vile murderers and cheats and make this time he had left far less confusing.  
  
This was childish, though. They weren’t and that was that. Really, he ought to see it as a positive thing, and he pushed a hair from his eyes, rubbed at his neck and looked at Jack.   
  
No, Jack wasn’t the first pirate.   
  
Just the first man.   
  
He does protest further, though, for “You must know that if I thought else I wouldn’t just have—“   
  
Jack runs the back of one hand down his cheek. “I know.”  
  
He holds the gaze. “I really wouldn’t forgive myself, Jack. It wouldn’t be right to stay. Though I  _had_  always half suspected I might die on a pirate ship.”  
  
“You know, I wish y’wouldn’t do that,” Jack murmurs, dropping his head and nudging up under James’s chin again, scooping a hand under his body to pull him in. “So bloody  _calm_  about it. It’s unsettlin’.”  
  
James raises an eyebrow. “Would you prefer hysterics?”  
  
Jack stays silent. Kisses his neck.  
  
They swing gently for a while. “It’s for the best that I leave,” James continues finally. “Where shall I…ah. Where do you think I should go? Perhaps you could drop me at nearest Port; somewhere not too obvious, of course, maybe…we could try somewhere in Mexico, I’ll just. I’ll just need a small place to—“  
  
Jack lifts his head and stops him, pressing his forehead to James’s. His eyes are huge, and very dark, his breath skitters over James’s mouth. “ _We’ll talk about it later, darling._ ”   
  
James stops himself short, and nods at him, blinking fast. James presses his mouth to his, and runs a hand up his side.  
  
He reaches for Jack’s clothing, pulling at the sash, getting his hands inside the shirt to skate over skin. Jack is already working at his own – pulls the jacket down to James’s elbows, nudges him back to sit up so he can peel it off with the shirt, drop it aside, moving back and then moving in.   
  
He is kneeling between James’s legs, but ducks his head; spreads his hands on James’s hips and kisses down the centre of James’s chest, the bump of every rib shifting under his skin, with his grip tightening as he goes and his brow furrowed. Licks a stripe between, sucks above the bellybutton and makes James gasp, stomach shallow, breath the same. He moves lower, mouths at the bulge in James’s crotch, earns a soft moan from James as he looks down at the way, with his eyes closed, Jack’s eyelashes blur into the kohl around his eyes and seem to smudge it lower.   
  
He unbuttons James’s breeches with slightly clumsy hands, and takes a wet bite at the skin revealed above the dark curls of hair to cover that fact, making James moan again and spread his legs. Pulls the breeches completely down and off in one go with James’s stockings and shoes, then tugs at his own, pushes them off with a sway of his hips; kick to the left, easy right, drop to brace on one hand and tug them off behind him. Jack rises again to lift his shirt and flicks it off in the same movement as he did with James’s, splayed feathers of white linen snapping out in the air, and James thinks of a swan, thinks swan song, thinks  _shut up_  and concentrates instead on his mess of black elflocks, the moustache and goatee lending even more shadow in the dimming room, burning eyes and cinnamon skin and the slightly lighter area of the nape of his neck revealed when Jack bends to take James’s cock in his hands and lick at it until he’s trembling.   
  
When James is gasping, shivering, sweat on his brow and colour on his cheeks, Jack lifts his mouth away and crawls further upwards, drops one knee either side of James and takes his hand – kisses the palm, and moves it between his legs to urge him in. He tilts his head to the ceiling at the same angle as his erection and rocks on two pale fingers, shivers going down his thighs, then lifts and guides them both to stretching burning  _fill_.   
  
Later, after they have slept, James wakes up first. He lays by Jack a moment in the evening quiet, thinking (about his ship, his friends, and the shades of blue grey playing over Jack’s face), then shimmies down to kiss the matching bruises on Jack’s knees. Jack wakes up at that, stretching out the tiny flare in his body at the movement, sighing softly.   
  
“That Navy thing?” he says, hissing a little when James brushes fingers across his bruises carefully and nods, then rubs at the twinge in his own neck again. “I was thinking about it. You might want to add Elizabeth onto the end of that list.”  
  
James pauses, then chuckles; coughs, then twice again, and lies down as well. “…Excellent point.”  
  
Thankfully, when they come out on deck it’s to find a cloudy night hanging over the sleeping Port Royal. That will make things easier, since they can’t exactly run if they’re caught.   
  
Jack shadows James as they slip into his house, and watches him silently take nothing obvious, though his fingers linger over others. He wishes, as he had when they’d actually met up here, that he had time to poke about properly, but the things that really tell James’s story are the ones he takes anyway. An old but sharp sword from under the loose floorboard in his bedroom (he’d  _thought_  he’d heard it creak when he’d padded barefoot across to the basin to get a washcloth), a few letters from the bedside drawer, including one he recognises his own handwriting on, and smiles; two books. An old silver earring unwrapped from a cloth, tucked away in the cupboard.   
  
James can’t touch his money, clearly, someone would know. He does go to his study, however. In the squat desk at the back of the room he unlocks one drawer, and removes his will.   
  
Jack eyes it as he crosses back to him across the room, but doesn’t get a very good look because the moon only comes out once James has passed the window.  
  
Pausing on the step outside the front door, James is unsure whether he should leave something for his friends, especially Theodore. His family are in his mind as well, have been all week, but then, it is just his father and William now. It’d be easier for them to hear of him snatched, to think of him as killed by an enemy, than this illness. And he is aware that the house will be looked through, not to mention that he cannot think of anything specific enough. At least his friends knew already, before Jack announced it to his ship.   
  
He thinks that’s the best thing he could have given them anyway.  
  
Jack tucks an arm around his waist in what has seemingly become their position, now, as he gently pulls the door shut, waiting for the lock to thud softly home. He brushes his fingers over the tops of the bushes on the edge of the small lawn that disappeared around the side of his house, as they go down his short path. He hopes they grow.   
  
They tread back through the deserted, dark streets, skirting around and past the entrance to the Fort, where Jack whisks his hat off and tugs free the two books James has under one arm. James stops, narrowing his eyes; Jack steps into the darkest patch of shadow by the wall and places them on the flat of his head, takes three silent, but slow and perfectly postured, steps. James smiles, then glares.  
  
By the waterfront, Jack produces a white scarf from his pocket and ties it around a palm. It’s a message for Will, he says. Which means Elizabeth will get it too, being Elizabeth, and James is eased a touch by that. They’re going to miss the wedding. It’s the next Saturday.   
  
James watches it disappear into the rest of the scenery as the  _Pearl_  sails away.   
  
In the cabin, after Gibbs has come to tell them that they’re making good time, Jack opens a small chest at the foot of the cot and pulls out a bundle of maps. He stretches them out on the table, and urges James to sit.   
  
“There’s a house on a bit of the coast in Cozumel I’ve kept an eye on since I was twenty-four,” he says, and James knows instinctively and immediately that there isn’t another person in the world who knows this. “Not for me t’live in now, nor when I first saw it, I was after a pretty ship I’d seen elsewhere – it was just for if somehow I ever managed to get to some ripe old age and needed somewhere for…oh, me money, me kids, me old legs if anything ever happened to the  _Pearl_ , somethin’ to that effect.“ He sits down as well, one finger tracing over the coastline but looking at James. “The man who owns it has held it for me, for...er, a long story, but—”  
  
“Jack.”  
  
“Mm?” Jack doesn’t look at him. He raises an eyebrow.  
  
“Oh  _alright_ , I knew you’d ask. Well, there was a…bit of a hoo ha with some jellyfish and his daughter. Anyway, so—“  
  
“ _Jack!_ ”  
  
"What?!”  
  
James leans across the map, elbow landing somewhere by the town Jack is describing, and lays a hand on Jack’s shoulder, curves it up over his neck. “Did you...did you save someone? The girl?”  
  
Jack clears his throat, and by God, he might actually be blushing. “...That’s quite probable, yes.”  
  
James feels the smile creep up on him, starting from his boots and spreading all the way to the top. “You – got injured, didn’t you? Oh!” He realises with a start, and breathes, “ _Your arm_.” Is pushing up Jack’s sleeve before Jack can pull away, and Jack holds still as he traces the lines as he has many a time but never asked because they seemed something...bigger, than his other scars. Jack holds still, but he is almost  _thrumming_ , a little glow under his downcast eyes.   
  
James tilts his head. “...Always jumping in after the lady, aren’t you?  
  
Jack’s grin is like water bouncing off the ocean, bright from more than just the gold in his mouth, and James welcomes the dazzle in his eyes.   
  
Brushing his elbow aside to explain some more, Jack rolls his sleeve back down as he talks. “It’s not all that big a place but it’ll do; summers are just as hot as at Port Royal’s an’ the house is up on this hill – protected, but close enough t’see the water on high tide. It’s a lovely little place. An’…well, besides, close t’the water, clearer air. Savvy?”  
  
James is nodding along – then stops, another thought dawning on him, slower this time. He sits back in his chair, mouth parted, with a slight frown. “But…that’s your…your back up. Jack, if you take that favour now, you won’t have anything for when—“  
  
“Aye, well I figure I owe you one for that headstart,” Jack interrupts, with a little smile.  
  
James stares at him for a moment, then has to duck his head. Agrees, and watches Jack roll up the maps with quiet movements, and put them back away.   
  
He tells Jack that he loves him for the first time that night, with his burning forehead pressed to the one completely unmarked flat of skin on Jack’s body, the space between his shoulderblades, and sweat pooling on the base of his spine.  
  
They reach Cozumel within two weeks. The crew keep their distance during the journey, which doesn’t really bother James because it lessens any risk, though the woman, Anamaria, snorts at the wide berth he gets from the others. James quickly comes to see her as beautiful, with skin as dark as the ship’s and pride in the set of her mouth and nose that he recognises in himself. Her ancestors went through illness from white men, and she refuses to cower from it when they did not.  
  
Gibbs just stands by him at the bowsprit because he wants to.

  
  
  
  
  
  
 **that which I have not yet achieved**  
  
They’ve passed one French ship and two apparently English sloops without making any action. Anchored once at Campeche to pick up more food and sell a little, is all.   
  
Towards the start of the second month, however, Matelot shouts their coming up on a small bark identified as Spanish by her colours. His low cry ripples sluggishly through the hot evening, and Jack takes the eyeglass to study the ship instead of just letting it pass.   
  
James goes over to him, and Jack passes him the glass to see. They’re in a quiet stretch of the Gulf, they’re running low on water, and the ship has no guard. Not to mention that it’s the kind of vessel that makes  _his_  palms itch – he can see how well stocked it must be. The kind of thing he’d always have looked out for because of what a target it makes.   
  
Jack is watching him, and he turns back. Swallows, nods and turns away.   
  
The  _Pearl_  races alongside, guns drawn, and when the vessel has surrendered, Jack leads most of the crew aboard. James stays with the  _Pearl_ , hanging back on her deck with Gibbs – remaining out of sight on the off chance that word would reach anyone it shouldn’t, were he clearly seen.  
  
He stands and watches Jack weaving among the boat’s passengers and his own crew, rising up onto the balls of his feet every now and then to get a clearer look. Tense calved, palm ghosting over the top of his sword. If there are any threats of violence he will move immediately – but who  _to_ , is a sudden thought.   
  
If any of Jack’s crew get over eager, if he has misjudged and any pistols or knives look to be used then he will go to protect those on the Spanish ship – but then, if any of  _them_  try and initiate violence, he knows that he would rush to the crew’s aid.   
  
It’s a slightly startling realisation.  
  
All in all, though, he has no call to move, for it turns out to be a shockingly civil hand over of goods at weapon point just as the sun starts to sizzle into the bright water, washing everything in orange-red.   
  
Oh, and evidently Jack can speak Spanish.   
  
He bids them fine sailing with a sweep of his hat, his crew already leading off behind him. James frowns, and scratches his eyebrow with his thumb as the men bring the goods back on, laughing, spirits spiked into good cheer – though Anamaria and Marty are fighting over a long string of pearls a long, black haired woman handed over to Jack. And he’s distinctly sure he saw her blush all the way from the  _Pearl_ , as well.   
  
It’d seem more like privateering than piracy, if privateering were any more civilised than the latter isn’t supposed to be. He suspects some part of Jack’s choice of  _this_  ship as the first to be that it wasn’t English, and he appreciates that – but he is not naïve enough to think that anything that loaded wouldn’t have been at best extremely hard to resist, even  _were_  it English. And so it is piracy.   
  
He thinks simply that this is Jack’s kind. Gives in trying to understand it, and instead raises the same eyebrow he just scratched when Jack offers a bit of the mango he’s tucking into, with a little grin and a silver chain wrapped around the piece. He frowns at it and turns, to head into their cabin or perhaps to aid Gibbs with something, but holds a moment, leans back on his bare heel to gently, reassuringly kiss some juice from the corner of Jack’s mouth before he leaves.  
  
It goes without saying that the life that he has now is the sort that he never imagined. Oh at times the ship, the boards creaking under his feet, the ropes snapping, the sails and the wind and the water, the sweat on his brow and pull in his muscles, the shouted orders and songs from the crew are so familiar that he almost loses himself in it. But there are the marked differences. The gold, the silver, the jeers, the drink, the gruffness of speech. Though… he will admit that perhaps  _part_  of it is something like what he had tried to imagine, at a time.   
  
The idea of…someone. To come home to – and it had been simply that, the  _idea_ , with no set form.  _Notion_  of a smile and ready hands and warm skin, weight in the bed next to him and the smooth slope of back tapering to hips he would watch when that person got up to dress. Just the possibility of catching the sound of humming before entering a room, or that it might proceed that person’s approach – someone, perhaps, and this one a thought he’d had repeatedly when pinning the wig into place, someone who might notice the slight curl on the tips of his hair (the ones he had when he was younger that the nurse stubbornly tried to flatten out, but always sneak back in.)   
  
And ah – companionable silence. That was the one. His own silly constructs. Own little concept of love.   
  
But here he has found them. Among the rigging and decks of the  _Pearl_.   
  
Though the thought of her as home, now, is something he can’t quite wrap his mind around. And it remains an issue working at him, especially since nothing else requires pressing attention. Nothing has chased them, and the weather remains clear, though stifling.   
  
Until finally, when a second full moon is just waning, a storm rolls in one afternoon, the sky darkening with little warning.   
  
The crew glance up and out, and immediately there is a flurry of movement – men ducking in and out of the cabins, boots and jackets back on. They scramble to their posts as the sea starts to whip up, rain breaking through the thick cover of cloud that has rolled in, the ship rocking as waves shatter against her sides like glass. There’s no moon, just blackgrey and white spark lightning striking it open, thunder deafening around them so often that no-one can pick out if it’s before or after.   
  
 _Everyone_  stays out that night, riding the  _Pearl_  on, and James realises as the bow dips into its first crash and flick of water that this will be the first storm he’s stood through without his full uniform or wig for years.   
  
He rather enjoys his hair sticking to his forehead and the long tail sliding against his neck, the drips down his collar. The wet ropes are as always both bloated and tight when he wraps his hands around them and heaves, their shouts are met by the storm, the  _Pearl_  creaks and cracks her back. The sky is dark and the clouds cover all of the constellations as well as the moon, but his eyelashes clump to the points of stars.   
  
Jack’s are doing the same when he feels a hand on his arm and turns on the top step to see him there, fingers sliding against the fabric of James’s shirt stuck to his skin.   
  
He’s taken his arm not to steady him in the roll and dip, because James is  _good_  at this, as good as Jack – and he knows none of the crew expected that, that Mr Straight Back Tight Arse Commodore might be able to loose and dip and sway with ease, but he  _can_. He knows when to turn and tense a thigh and drop a hip, can flex his booted feet easily against the deck and move and  _roll_  while some scrabble and slip, because he’s a good sailor, because damn it  _he loves the sea_  – except for Gibbs, of course, who’d seen him do it on the crossing over here, when his legs were even less experienced than they are now.  
  
No, it’s not to steady him.   
  
It’s to bring him a step nearer.   
  
Jack is asking for James’s strong hand with his on the wheel.   
  
In the slap of cold water and wind, Jack’s thumb on top of his arm is hot like he’s smudging in his own brand, and James pauses. To help is one thing, to actually take the helm another. But it’s Jack, and his choice, and he braces with the ship swelling under them and nods, steps into a sway and comes to the helm. Flips his hair from his eyes when he curls his hand around the spoke next to Jack’s, and – and _oh_. It. Oh.   
  
A flash of lightning shoots from sky to water again like his old sword had in the moonlight, and for a second everything is clear –  _everything_ : the rain now driving sideways, the wind whipping under their feet and bracing its shoulders against the sails, the pirate crew, the pirate  _ship_  with himself standing buffeted at its helm, and what  _is_  he, now?   
  
An undead lovestruck imbecile with a cursed gold coin now sewn into his breeches waistband, that’s what, a man standing with a thief next to him – a gambler, a wanted pirate Captain, not to mention confusing and unpredictable and quite simply  _weird_ , but Christ, oh Christ, he feels so completely  _alive_  suddenly. It might be from Jack nearby, or from the same rush of blood he has always got out on the water but that Jack seems to find a way to carry onto land, but whichever it would take his breath if that were a concern any more because this, this is Jack, and he is so beautiful in everything he does that it can’t help but make James’s heart soar. The water strips them down until they’re simply men (and a woman yelling louder than them all), and he and Jack’s rough knuckles match, their wet shoulders stick, when they tug the wheel aft and down.  
  
The coin didn’t tie them, James was wrong. It has  _lashed_  them together, he the mast and Jack standing fast to him, lashed by the coin – and he realises that he might, good god he might be happy. As long as he has what he has now. Rush of colours, the heat of Jack against him at night.   
  
Yes. Yes, as long as Jack is near.  
  
The time does pass quickly, at first. He becomes content, which is another surprise. There really isn’t a lot more he would ask for, as the weeks become a month become more ships, become the sight of America’s lower coast. And perhaps that’s why nothing seems to have happened to him: he has no thirst to quench, no greed for more. Having known that he was dying, and then suddenly he was not – to find rough palms on his face pulling him closer, this is enough. This is amazing. He makes sure to fiercely appreciate Jack.   
  
So predictably, things change.   
  
Just how settled he was coming to be is evidenced clearly, by the fact that he does not pick up on his dulling sensations as quickly as he would have, before.   
  
  
  
  
  
  


 **nothing I’d lament being rid of**  
  
The cove where they settle the  _Pearl_  is shallow, with trees right up to the beach, their leaves a dark and scrubbed green. It’s bright in Cozumel, so bright it seems to bounce off the sand, but on the skin of the few people down by the water (fishermen who stand in their single-masted boats and watch them pass, dazzle on the cross lines of the wet nets held in their hands; two women walking along, bright red skirts and bundles tucked to their sides; three boys playing on the beach) the sun softens, turning them perhaps two shades darker than Jack, golden like caramel on the curves of their shoulders, hips and feet.   
  
He’s a touch darker himself, after their journey – he’d been out on deck when he could. Kept away from the crew of course (which hadn’t been difficult), just as he’d tried to maintain three steps from his own, once he knew.   
  
He’d insisted he could help with something, and Jack had smiled and sent him to the helm on an easy day. Unexpected, and, he knew, huge. The  _Pearl_. The wheel was well worn, smooth when he carefully put his hands on it, and Jack had been watching, and come and stood behind him, chin on his shoulder to see how she responded to him. He’d guided her twice, for an hour or so each time, and on both Jack had come up every now and then, standing with him, hands over his on the wheel, sharing it. A pirate ship – a  _pirate_  ship, but really and simply Jack’s, his most precious thing, and that somehow had made her beautiful under James’s hands.   
  
The warm air had done nothing to help the thick wetness in his throat, though. His breath has started coming in a soft, rattling wheeze, and he’s coming to perfect the art of when to take a moment, sit down with his back very straight to try and help it pass.   
  
When his boots touch the sand, it’s a relief, because as wonderful as the  _Pearl_  is, the movement underfoot has not helped him when he’s dizzy, when he hacked bloody spit into Jack’s washing bowl this morning. His neck muscles are tight and stretched from coughing, his eyes have been watering from the sun off the water and the endless irritation in his chest – yesterday, not long after they had sighted the coast, a storm had rolled in. He had welcomed the cold water on his face.   
  
Jack had ordered hands aloft and the sails reefed, and then the anchor lowered, steadying them through the storm - they’d stayed in it instead of fighting on. And James probably should have gone inside, but that he never did in storms. He wouldn’t leave the men, the deck, the ship, and though these weren’t his, he’d sat on the foredeck steps to wait it out.   
  
Admittedly, however, it was partly for himself. Because the cold had turned his chest sharp and clear, for once, sliced space into his head, and it stung and prickled and chilled like too cool mint breath in his lungs, ice burn, but it was better than the cloying wetness. The sticky tightness, closing in. Jack had shouted his orders, watched the crew steadying with the ship, letting her go with the waves, but gone after a time and sat next to him. Slipped an arm around his waist and flattened a palm on his side, and they’d waited together as the sky had whipped apart and rain poured down, soothing drops streaming over James’s aching temples, inside his coat, over his closed eyelids when he tipped his head back onto Jack’s shoulder and let the wind scream through his hair and remind him he was still very much there.   
  
Jack had finally sworn and taken him in as the worst was just blowing over, and he’d already had water heating in the galley, but James was no longer surprised by things like this. There was James peeling off the cold wet clothes and Jack following with his own, there was him washing them both clean with warm cloths and getting water all over the floor and making James nudge him a bit, shivering, and them both smile; there was Jack laying with him in the bed after, under the covers with just one lantern lit and James’s fingers tracing his scars again, and there was him not telling him he was stupid because Jack understood, instead telling him he was daft, which was better (and also that Christ he looked good wet). And then he’d told the story about a girl trying to be as good as her bigger sisters, and a young pirate leaning over his boat’s edge to take in the...view. A swarm of jellyfish. Another daft move. Another sting, and tugging burn.  
  
Today, around these people, he knows his paleness, drawn face and thinned lips are far more apparent. But he still walks straight and looks them in the eye, tilts his head to the women. Notes Jack doing the same.  
  
The man who opens the bright blue door of a small stone house to Jack is grey haired, squat shouldered and tiny, only reaching to Jack’s shoulder. Jack quirks a half grin.   
  
“’Ello,” he says, taking off his hat – the man’s eyes widen and he pulls Jack immediately into a bracing hug, yanking him down to his level so that Jack has to stoop. He jabbers something, slaps Jack’s back with a laugh.   
  
James likes the man, Benito, straight away, but hopes he doesn’t get the same greeting. The stare he gets before the man sets off leading them to the house speaks volumes about that  _not_  taking place.   
  
He walks them through old streets, past houses with bright shutters and dusty stone, back toward the beach, curving along a path that slopes steadily down through the trees towards the edge of the land. Jack’s house is partway down the path – they come out into the little clearing in front of it; short brown grass, an ancient well, and it is indeed close enough to see the beach, the waves rolling onto it foamy like the few clouds above. It is protected by the trees and its height; white painted stone, a flat roof, red blooming flowers snaking all over the front of its single level, and unusually, what was once a doorway now turned into a huge window at the front, looking out.   
  
It is an astounding little house. Benito could clearly have sold it for a lot of profit at any time, yet he’s kept it faithfully for Jack.   
  
When a cry heralds the arrival of a young woman running down the path and across the stones to join them, arms in the air and chattering in Spanish as she leaps at Jack, it’s clear why.  
  
She’s in her early twenties, now, a head past her father and the right height to look Jack in the face, which is obviously a surprise because he jerks back to stare at her. Small boned, soft bellied, with large black eyes and hips that curve, a mouth that does the same when she cups Jack’s face excitedly, talking all the while and looking him up and down, breaking into a smile. She has a metal pendant around her neck the same as the one in his hair, and long, trailing lines of silver on the dark skin of her calves, which he only glimpses because he knows to look for it, just visible when the edge of skirt tangles around her legs in the breeze. Her teeth are as white as bone, except for a gap in the corner on the bottom row where she’s missing a molar. It makes James smile back.   
  
Jack gestures to James, introduces him with just seven words and a grin. He inclines his head politely, hoping he doesn’t look too awful, and he’s more than a little concerned about just how Jack worded that, because Maria’s eyes get even bigger, looking back and forth between the two of them in starts. Benito, mouth open to greet him, lets out a little wheeze, and James is unsure whether it came out of his throat, his nose, or maybe even his moustache. (That thing is threatening to come alive.) He frowns and leans back, folding his hands across his belly; looks at James, Jack, then his daughter, tilts his head, looks back to James for a moment, then rolls his black eyes and shrugs one shoulder, mutters something at Jack before turning away and trudging back up the path.   
  
James glances at Jack, but he’s still grinning, so he can only take that as positive.   
  
Someone taps his arm, and he turns to see Maria, arms folded, face hard. He straightens his hat, and says hello, as one should, but she reaches out and takes his face as she had done to Jack, though a touch gentler, and he freezes in surprise. She guides his chin one way, then the other, and folds her arms again.   
  
Smiles slowly, and nudges Jack with an elbow and a grin on her way back after her father.  
  
He blinks, and pushes his hat back a little, wipes his hand across his forehead. “I...ah, Jack?”  
  
Jack slips an arm around his waist. “You alright?”  
  
“Yes, I’m – what was that about? What did he say?”  
  
Jack cleared his throat. “Oh, y’know.” He shrugged. “That he’d heard a lot about pirates that didn’t make much sense, which of course meant I’d be doing it.”  
  
James raised an eyebrow. “Knows you well, then.”  
  
Jack chuckled. “So it would seem, love.”  
  
He glances around him again. From here, the beach looks a little like a huge yellow-white cloth stretched out by the water, and reminds him of the one Jack left tied around that palm. “Hmn. And what, exactly, did you describe me as?”  
  
Jack held a hand up. “That...” He paused, curled his fingers in the air. “Would be something it’d be best if I never tell you.”  
  
James snorted, sighed, and rubbed his neck. “I thought as much.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

**the same care and devotion to every part of his life**  
  
He picks up a bottle of rum for Jack on his way out of the cabin, and drops it as he goes through the doors. It doesn’t break, luckily, just bounces on the deck and rolls to knock against his ankle. He stares at it, then at his hand, curling his fingers in as he’d thought they had been, around the neck.   
  
The tips feel thicker than normal.   
  
Gibbs looks up from his contemplation of the water, wiping the sweat off his brow with his shirt sleeve.   
  
“Alright there, James, lad?” (He’s taken to calling him lad, as he never could before. James had looked after him with a slightly amused frown the first time, and Jack had chuckled. He still hasn’t decided if he likes it, or should be affronted.)   
  
He blinks away his frown this time and waves Gibbs’ attention off with a half smile. Flexes his fingers, and picks the bottle up.   
  
It comes to a point, soon after, where he cannot feel Jack’s beard or moustache tickling his skin, and the metal in Jack’s hair doesn’t warm up against him like normal. The wave of sweatsmell the combined crew accumulates by the end of the day doesn’t bother him (not that he was unused to it with his men), nor Lambert’s occasionally atrocious cooking, though Marty’s reaction still makes him hide his amusement.   
  
And finally when Jack, James and some of the crew are sitting in a circle in the laze of an afternoon, Anamaria telling some tale that has even Cotton wincing, when James gets up to stretch his legs and find a tie for his hair (as the last one got lost and the wind is whipping it into Jack – not that he seems to mind – and there is  _absolutely_  no way that James will be persuaded to attempt Jack’s trick as had been that done to Ana, that time), Jack follows. His shoulders are smooth and brown and the grin on his face when James reveals that he had heard him all along and turns by their cabin, eyebrow raised, softens to a slow curve of his lips, and both their lashes lowering, when he just has to reach out and touch Jack’s chest.   
  
The shock when he is backed up hard against the wall registers as nothing more than a dull thud.   
  
Jack seems to be moving faster than he is.  
  
Panicking, James shuts his eyes. He tries to block out everything but Jack’s mouth on the underside of his jaw and the thigh slipping between his own, the growing hardness pressing up into the groove of his hip. And then he knows;  _this_  is slowing down.   
  
He manages to turn his cry into a different one, and stemming the urge to shake his head wildly and back away, tugs Jack inside the cabin with him, straight to the cot - tumbles them both into it and then pulls at Jack’s sash.   
  
Unwraps it, and re-ties it around his eyes.   
  
Jack freezes, knelt in front of him as he lowers his hands from the hasty knot, mouth throbbing.   
  
“…Love?” he asks, voice hoarse and deep. James presses forwards blindly to find him, knowing by familiarity how slightly to duck his head and find the soft lips, and then they are pushing back and opening with a little growl, Jack enveloping him and settling him flat, arranging him. He nips and sucks at James’s mouth and neck and collarbone, hands now under and ripping at the buttons on his breeches and loose shirt, leaving his body exposed to the air.  
  
He hopes, he curls his toes in and flares his nostrils and  _hopes_  that the complete loss of one sense will make the others jump back – and oh it does, it does, Jack’s stomach and chest are almost burning hot against his own, the hands and kisses don’t stay still, the thumbs rubbing and tugging over his nipples as Jack breathes his name over and over into the curve of his neck make his calves tremble. The sudden tongue swiping up the underside of his aching cock is an unexpected gasp that stutters and echoes and rushes up through him to his groin, his teeth clench, he hears the clink of a ring on the oil jar and by the time Jack is lifting his legs up towards his shoulders he can’t catch onto anything.   
  
There’s no foundation, no guide – it’s almost too much of a rush and he’s dizzy in the black behind the salt-stiff sash with the  _relief_  of it. This must be how it is to be Jack, completely focused on sensation. Head back and the knot against the pillows and pushing into his skull, breathing harshly as rough palms glide up the outsides of his thighs with the hint, once or twice, of Jack’s prepared fingers brushing accidentally against his skin – until Jack pauses, murmuring something, and his legs are being lowered flat again.   
  
He doesn’t understand. Panting, he moves towards the slight sounds, as though that will help.   
  
“…Jack?” he questions, and the man  _mmmn_ s in reply, laying a hand flat on his stomach to reassure him. James reaches out as well and bumps into Jack’s chest, the slight rise of the old, healed musket burns, slides his hand across and down a side and that hip groove he loves so much, over a smooth buttock, then grasps at the top of Jack’s thigh to try and anchor himself.   
  
He can feel the ripple of repeated movements going through Jack’s body and he still doesn’t get it, frowning under the sash, but he doesn’t manage to ask it out loud before they have stopped, and then a slick hand closes around his cock, stealing his voice. Two slow twists and tugs, pushslide to base and back, and the one on his belly starts to stroke in time. He moans and gasps and grips even tighter on Jack’s skin.   
  
“You with me now?” Jack practically purrs, amusement and arousal darkening his words, and he very much is, as Jack smoothes his thumb once over the head and licks at one of his nipples. Jack was readying himself, is now readying him, and he can’t  _see_  but he knows, with his heels scratching the covers and the easy slide and pull of the hand around him sending waves lapping up his spine. The cot shifts as Jack does, weight settles across James’s thighs, and the ends of Jack’s hair brush his chest when Jack moves over and – lowers himself down.   
  
He slips inside Jack’s body easily, tight, and chokes at it, nails digging in and probably bruising Jack’s skin. “Ahhh…” he moans again on an exhale, long and low, and moves his other hand from where he had it curled over the side of the cot to grab for Jack, has the fingers caught by the ones that had still been pressing gently on his stomach. With a sigh, Jack moves after a second, sways forward then back, and pulls a cry from them both.   
  
He laces their fingers together as sparks flare in the blackness behind his squeezed shut eyes, under the cloth, whitegold and red and almost blue, and Jack moves again, making his hips jerk up. He slides harder, deeper, makes Jack arch and groan, and this is…it is…it might be everything, it seems to be and James thinks that he might have been wrong, so he swallows and thrusts up again, knowing Jack is holding himself slightly up and ready for it. Tries to listen carefully as he does, and there is heat and a hiss and he feels it, his cock  _twitches_ , at Jack’s grunt and twist and the pleasure that echoes through him.   
  
He relaxes. It’s there, it’s normal, and he breathes, “God, Jack…”   
  
“I have my moments of brilliance, ay?”  
  
He tips his head back in reply, relief again, would thank someone if he knew who, and plants his feet flat on the cot for Jack to rest against the tops of his thighs, imagining the white whip scars across Jack’s lower back against the old, dark sword swipe on the top of his left leg. Rolls up to Jack, encourages him to roll back, and shudders, licks his lips, thrusts. Jack finds a rhythm, setting them to back and forth, and after three lifts and resettles James sees it, feels it, picks it up; he rocks into it and— that’s it. He gets comfortable, he moves into the (extra)ordinary familiarity of Jack around him and with a moment, like a spasm, everything he is feeling suddenly halves.   
  
He freezes. Jack continues.   
  
It starts to fade away.   
  
It starts to  _fade away_ , oh God. Oh, god no,  _this_  can’t fade – it can’t, it was so vivid that James could see the image burning slowly into his eyes, so bright it was - it is as though Jack is silhouetted against the sun. He will have his mouth parted, his eyes open under lowered lids; James pictures the snap-slow movement of his hips and free hand tugging at himself, and he has given himself entirely over for this, entirely, is receiving utterly everything back as Jack lowers their clasped hands and unlaces them to press and balance himself, drops his head to kiss James’s chest as he pants, asks for more.   
  
What is it, is James now learning that after this time it’s…not enough? Is that it? It’s not  _enough_?   
  
His stomach clenches in horror and he can’t really feel that either, his eyes open, eyelashes scratching against the fabric around his head. Jack sits back up, braids tickling vaguely against the hollows of James’s neck, gives a faster press of his hips and the image of it changes. It isn’t the sun behind Jack, it’s the coin, and the face that smiles at him isn’t Jack’s, it’s the coin’s as well, bright and high boned and grinning.   
  
He chokes again and tugs his hands free, rips at the blindfold with them, biting his lip not to say anything as he fumbles with the knot before giving in and yanking it off from the front. He stares at the reality, Jack with sweat on his cheeks and on his upper lip, eyes dilated as he stills, looking back at James with a slight tilt to his head and his headscarf dark with sweat as well.   
  
James cannot say it. How would one - could one word that? He can’t, couldn’t possibly, and he struggles up and tugs Jack down and closer, into his lap, kisses him hard instead. Holds Jack’s hips and presses, works to graze that spot inside of Jack over and over, watching him tense and mewl; lifts him, somehow rises up to meet him on the down press again, and lets Jack’s harsh pants and encouragement ground him, and bring him over. The inevitable, though now sickeningly distant sensation of his body and that gaze.  
  
What James can possibly want, he doesn’t know. Not to be cursed, most likely. Not to be on a pirate ship. Perhaps to see his friends. And soon after that the weather ceases to really register, and his throat goes dry for reasons other than that and the way he catches Jack’s dark eyes on him, the sounds Jack makes when James twists two fingers deep inside him and bites at the first bump of his spine, the ease with which he lies by his side.  
  
He finds that he is tired, too. But he’d been getting used to that before the coin anyway.  
  
This time he at least makes the conscious decision to finally admit it to Jack. He explains what’s happening a week or so later, staring at a far wall, and afterwards, because he’s never been able to hold back speaking his mind for long, he tells Jack that he wants to leave.   
  
It’s difficult to explain because that’s not exactly what he means: he doesn’t want to be away from Jack but he can’t have…it’s not the same. Maybe distance will make things more brilliant when he gets them again. There is no set conduct for this kind of situation, here, he can only guess.   
  
Jack takes another drink, and nods silently. He crosses to sit by James and tells him about a place called Cozumel, and the story with it – a  _tale_ , another truth, about a little girl and a favour he is owed, the reasons for the scars on his arm. James strokes his palm over the silvery lines, amazed at seeing them in their real light, kisses them, but explains that he needs something of his own.   
  
Jack comes to him later with the location of a little fishing community, in the bay of Campeche. James explained once how he used to fish with his father.   
  
A box from their cabin that is full of jewellery (rings, gold necklaces, a thick silver cuff and a tiny kite made from abalone shell) from the Spanish bark and the Isle buys James a small boat he names  _Morglay_.   
  
He plans to leave his cabin door open on nights. It’s not a morbid fascination (or, perhaps it is), but that he spent so long not thinking about the blood and the spasms, before. He will not allow himself to do it again with this type of curse. Jack hasn’t looked away once, and he won’t either.   
  
The village takes him in without question, because though he’s lean, he’s strong. He’s not afraid to work long and hard, and he seems to find it easy to be in the cold water all day. At night, they don’t see him much, but he is an oddity, so pale around them, that maybe he feels out of place. They aren’t offended.   
  
As the first weeks pass and they teach him what they can (what little Jack knew of their language standing him in good enough stead to get by, gestures and their patience doing the rest), he feels things receding even more. He’s concentrating on it now, even though he doesn’t want to be – like a cut under one’s thumbnail that cannot be left alone. When Jack visits the first time, after a month or so, his body feels as blunted as before – as though it cannot match the emotions in him that don’t know which way to turn. He picks up the skill of fishing quickly, nonetheless, and the villagers are gentle and unassuming. They accept him easily.  
  
He protects them. Not easy to give up that habit, not that he’d ever thought it would be. His position was so ingrained for a reason – he  _wants_  to. To protect the freedom of people was why he wanted to do his job, and he sees that that was why he found himself able to admire Jack in some way. He admires freedom, and he knows Jack does too. Doesn’t threaten other peoples’, when he tries to get his own.   
  
It is a quiet place, poor and slow, but full of colour. The houses of the village are right next to the river, which flows through a small wood, curving and swelling out to a beach and the sea, and this arrangement helps to protect them as well – the land tucks the village just out of sight.   
  
Towards the time that James will set his sixth month’s mark into the wood by the door of his cabin, however, there is a boat one night, followed by another. Curved swords and many feet, flaming torches and a pirate Captain with a small but brutal mind. There’s little wealth but still they’ve come, and James wonders at the desperation, at who might have taken over the protection of the waters he once was feared in. Perhaps it’s Theodore. Anthony?  
  
The men of the village rush to the riverbanks as the pirates arrive, and do their best. They’re barefoot and like living shadows in the night, so dark their skin, but they’re fishermen. They don’t know what they’re doing with a few blunt swords, clubs and fists, and when James glances at the overcast sky and throws on a shirt to rush and join them, barefoot too and wielding the sword William Turner made him, instead of his old one, it’s terrifying because of it. In a way he hasn’t experienced before, because he can’t protect them or help them  _all_ , like this.   
  
Yet he needn’t have worried so, as there comes something primal around him, a crude but fierce beauty about the way they block the paths to their homes and their children.   
  
He stands with those on the edges of the trees and cuts down those who try to pass; ignores the dull slice across his upper arm from a gangly Chinese pirate, the one landed punch from a skew-faced and yelling Irishman. It doesn’t matter if his nose is broken; he’s learnt that if he goes to bone and back, anything can be fixed. ( _Christ! Well…that explains the tanning thing_  Jack had shouted above a howling storm on their way to the village, all ready to set the fingers James had just broken in the  _Morglay_ ’s lines until a sliver of moonlight had forced its way through the cloud and then slipped away again.)  
  
The wind starts to pick up as he dodges a sword strike to his stomach, then throws an elbow at the pirate who can’t possibly be more than half his age, hearing  _and_  feeling a cheekbone splinter under it, the shards spraying up into softer flesh. He spins back to whip his blade across the man’s throat and cut short the agony of that, and as the body hits the earth, the cover breaks to reveal the half moon.   
  
He slips back into the forest immediately, under the dappled, creaking eaves. He’s managed to keep it secret so far, an almost miraculous achievement mainly out of fear of what the villagers might say or do, if they saw him. He does not want to frighten them, they have accepted him so openly, and he is sure that they would drive him out – Jack had shared that opinion, telling him to keep his nose clean the when he left yesterday morning, which he’d assumed was Jack’s way for telling him to be careful. (This coming from a pirate who’d also had sweat and dirt and lamp black on his at the time.) Yet he has always agreed with the thought, and briefly grapples with the urge to turn and hide back in his house.   
  
Briefly.   
  
He will not simply run and hide when they are in danger. Never, no matter what bloody incarnation he is in.   
  
He turns into the forest instead, and sprints off along its edge, running through the soft black soil and pools of shadow punctuated by lit clearings, feeling his skin ripple and pull back and reappear each time. He steps down from the cover of the trees onto the sand when he reaches the beach, and knocks out the man who turns and yells in alarm with his sword hilt. Catches the torch he drops before it can be smothered by the floor, and the pirates still milling from the boats and heading upriver meet death with one of their flaming brands in its hand of bones and more skeleton visible through its tattered clothes, burning bright eyes and ghostly flesh and a sword that flicks white gold in the moonlight.   
  
He’s used to some pirates fleeing in panic when he made his presence known, but this is unparalleled, even for him. Most scatter, shouting, some running right into the water and swimming (flailing) back out into the sea. Those who don’t tentatively strike at him, eyes huge and strokes desperate. They fall easily.   
  
He is standing back on the edge of the forest and plotting the path of the pirates back towards the shape of their ship on the horizon – a pink, as far as he can tell – by the disturbances their bodies make on the surface, when something cracks behind him. He whirls, sword out, to see a little girl of no more than six, staring open mouthed up at him, and an old woman he recognises as living in one of the houses closest to the river. They must have tried to find cover in the trees.   
  
The old woman screams, dropping to her knees, and raises her leathery palms towards the sky with a moan, gabbling to him and the child. James stumbles backwards onto the beach, aghast, and begins to stutter half an apology in what little he knows of their language, but his voice seems to make it worse. He stops, glances up to the head of the next cove, then with a look back at the woman and the child, starts to run – but in two of his steps the little girl has scrambled five and a half. The soles of her feet scuff and squeak on the sand as she manages to jump down in front of him.  
  
He pulls up short, staring down at her. Tries to step around her only to have her jump backwards and continue to block his path, silently looking at him. The old woman is still chanting something and he tries something else, turns and takes a stride up the slope into the shadow of the trees, but the child reaches out and wraps her dark fingers around the exposed part of his femur through his (automatically) tattered breeches, on the leg not raised.   
  
He gasps aloud – it’s more of a dry wheeze, really, since he doesn’t actually have lungs like this – and literally stops mid step. The old woman moans again and drops her head to the sand, and the child pauses. When he turns and looks carefully down at her over his shoulder, her eyes are so huge they seem to eclipse her face, her breath coming in fast little swallows, but she visibly steels herself, and  _tugs_ him insistently back. He moves where she wants so as not to alarm her any further, and holds as she lets go, stares at him, then starts to walk around him just as Jack had done once (though lacking his easy movements), gnawing on a thumb.   
  
Following her with his eyes, he recognises her suddenly. Almost a week ago she’d run away from a group of other young children and the woman keeping an eye on them as she washed clothes in the mouth of the river, to come to him as he stood watching Jack swim back to the  _Pearl_  (“I’m not bloody rowin’ again”), with the sweltering morning sun as a tiny hint of warmth across his bare shoulders. When the _Pearl_ had finally sailed so far that he was unable to pick out anything more than the shape of her sails, he’d looked away, and spotted the child with a start.   
  
She’d grinned brightly up at him, and followed when he’d smiled back and begun to move. Considering her, he’d nodded to the guardian woman who was finishing and gathering the children again, and picked her up, carrying her back along the river to the village with him, balanced on the opposite hip to the one where the coin lay (now with strong thread twisted into it, knotted around his waistband every day). Let her gently poke and prod at his face and examine her skin tone against his, wind curious fingers into his hair and turn his head to see the tiny bead Jack had taken from his own and plaited into his, behind his left ear.   
  
She pauses on her second time around, and looks up over his partly exposed ribcage at the remaining flesh over his collarbones, his flapping shirt. She tugs at her pink lip in thought and frowns so seriously it’s almost comic, though he’s so desperate not to frighten her off with any reaction that he hasn’t moved an inch or any muscles that he has, and he quashes any amusement (mixed with horror mixed with fear mixed with annoyance – his emotions overcompensate, now, he’s found) then heaves a great deep breath to brace herself, and—  
pokes his hipbone.   
  
Taps it with her fist when there’s no reaction, and presses her head against it to…oh. Right. To hear if there’s an echo.  
  
He bloody hopes there isn’t.  
  
She must like what she deduces though, because she breaks into a smile again, looking up at him again, and plants a kiss on his hip before running over to the woman.   
  
He thinks he…doesn’t, actually. Speechless. His throat burns, unusual, and he curses that it is going to be about two months before he sees Jack again, wishes he were here, because he’s not sure how he could explain this believably. Or in words. Fitting, as the girl clearly doesn’t need them.  
  
She pulls the old woman to her feet, shaking away the clinging grip, then crosses back to him and grabs his hand to bring him over into the shade with them. She shows her (he assumes) grandmother how he changes back, now actually saying something, gesturing at his face and sword. The old woman clutches her once more, then tentatively at him, running fingers over his face that must be as calloused as Jack’s for he is able to  _feel_  them, babbling in their language too fast for him to follow anything at all.   
  
They hurry him back to the village, where she calls out to the men not busy helping the injured, or covering the few dead. They circle him immediately, and he’s absurdly grateful the child has her arm hooked around his thigh again because many of them are splattered with blood, a few even having smeared it onto their cheeks or drawn swirls and shapes with it like the paint of Indians he saw off Virginia and Jamestown when he was twenty eight. But their faces are quiet, now, as they take in the matching dark red on his sword and shirt.   
  
As far as he can tell, he is asked to demonstrate to them. He pushes the girl gently away, and steps down into some moonlight by the river’s edge. On his changing, a collective sigh, like the wind, runs through everyone watching him.   
  
The songs they sing later around a great fire burning the bodies of their fallen thank him, and the spirits, for bringing them a guardian with the tide. Having sat with them, the girl on the floor by his knee drawing stories and pictures on the floor for him, he makes to go back to his hut at dawn, when the light starts to creep in from the sea and up the river. The old woman clutches at his arm as he passes her, and tells him slowly and carefully that she saw a burden, in his bones.   
  
He doesn’t know the words to explain how right she is.  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 **this is not the time for rash actions**  
  
Jack calls the crew to a meeting on the beach, and explains that he is staying for a while with James. That he’ll take the  _Pearl_  that very day to he mainland where all can take their leave if they see fit, and if they don’t return when he sails again he’ll not begrudge them, they’ll be as fine pirates and men as when he took them on. He also says that should any wish to return, then they ought to keep an eye on Cape Horn. He’ll be sailing past it by the time the seasons change, and will pick up any who want to reboard.  
  
There are nods and tipped hats as they head off back towards the jetty. Jack hangs back, turns to tell James he ought to return by the next sunrise.   
  
James’s expression is tight. “I feel like I ought to be some ailing wife left at home while her sailor goes off to sea,” he mutters to Jack, a sour taste in his mouth. Jack snorts softly, and dips a hand to cup the outline of James’s crotch. “Not quite,” he says, and kisses James’s neck.   
  
James sleeps fitfully in the bed that has been dragged into that front room in front of the almost floor to ceiling window, in too much space between old white sheets Benito lent, his clothes folded neatly on the low dresser – the only other bit of furniture in the house. He wakes, thirsty yet his throat clogged, to bright light streaming in over the bed and scents layering over the previous one of  _empty_ : suede and damp clothes and musk-salt-rum and apple, and the rustling fabric and gently clinking beads that herald Jack’s return.   
  
Sleepily, his head throbbing, he shifts towards the dip of the mattress when Jack puts down some things he’s brought with him, including the biggest coverlet from his cot in the  _Pearl_ , and sits carefully, taking his coat off. Jack turns to look at him – he opens his eyes after a moment of silent scrutiny and Jack pauses, then smiles, laying down beside him.   
  
He lays a hand flat on James’s belly; James scratches his hair stuck to the back of his neck, turns his head to cough away the rattle in his chest, and then back, and laces his fingers with Jack’s.   
  
“Are you alright?” he asks, and Jack cocks his head in surprise, then nudges him with a knee. “Though I was meant t’be asking  _you_  that,” he scolds.   
  
“Well I do like to be unpredictable.”   
  
Jack chuckles, lightly bites and then kisses his shoulder. “Yes you do.”   
  
He lies down completely, then, wiggling until the mattress is comfortable enough for his tastes. A moment (James waits for it, keeping his face straight), then Jack makes a whining noise and sits up, yanking his forgotten hat off. He throws it over his shoulder and lays down again.  
  
“I’m knackered,” he breathes into James’s neck, throwing an arm across his body.  
  
“Oh good,” James says, turning to press his cheek against Jack’s cool headscarf. “So am I.”  
  
The  _Pearl_  is anchored carefully in the bay, her tops'l yards just visible from the house. Most of the crew have headed into the mainland, off into Mexico, Jack tells him over an extremely late breakfast. Or, lunch. Well, whichever it is, Jack insists that they eat the bread and fruit he got from Benito on his way up to the house in bed, after moving it all onto the covers and taking off his clothes, just because.   
  
He lays his head back on James’s stomach halfway through, able to since James is not eating much, closes his eyes and complains that he has land sickness.  
  
“Get me a grape, love?” he asks, gesturing lazily with one hand towards them. He grins suddenly. “You know, I saw a Sultan doing this once.”  
  
James raises an eyebrow and pushes the grape up his nose.   
  
Gibbs has chosen to stay on the island as well. James isn’t surprised, but still pleasantly touched. It’s almost impossible to dislike the man, whose company he has appreciated more than he can say.   
  
Anamaria’s decision  _is_  unexpected. Jack thinks she’s taken a begrudged liking to James. He scoffs at that, but Jack persists. “Though really, Anamaria’s reasons in whatever she does are her own, she likely we’ll never know. Then again, it might have been Benito,” he grins. James elbows him, then wonders if he might actually be serious.   
  
They bring important things from the  _Pearl_  to the house; smaller, odd bits of furniture, plates, cloth, pillows and other things from Jack’s cabin. It only takes two trips; would have been one but Jack’s not accustomed to letting strangers on his ship, so it’s only a few of them collecting. James goes on the first trip, takes his books and some of Jack’s, a few charts, the earring still in its cloth.   
  
He decides to only walk to the beach for the return of the second, though, meeting Gibbs, Jack, Anamaria and Benito on their way back. It’s  _tiring_ , and the sun is too hard on his eyes. He finds it incredibly frustrating – he was young and fit, for Christ’s sake, and now his knees shake under the weight of the few belongings he takes and the thick silver candlestick he snags off Gibbs before the man can continue to kick it along the sand, making he and Jack wince.   
  
Jack winds an arm about his waist to help him walk back, shifting a set of curtains to under his other arm, and James snaps at him, pushing him away – spasms and bends double, coughing.   
  
He wakes up with a fever the next day, and stays in bed. Gibbs gets the last of the things, and Jack moves the dresser with the bowl of water closer, sitting up next to James while he sleeps fitfully.  
  
He thinks that James looks too pale in the white sheets, too like them, and reaches out for the deep red coverlet, thrown over a chair. Then realises that it will make him look even lighter, and just drapes it over the end of the bed instead.  
  
James’s eyes burn overbright when they’re open, sweat across his brow and upper lip. His breath wheezes in his chest most of the time, the muscles in his neck and shoulders scream whenever he hunches to cough. On the fall of the following evening, though, he finally wakes a little calmer.   
  
He stretches his arms out carefully, and pushes back against the pillows, settling higher up. Realises actually that’s Jack, crawled in half behind him, one hand stroking over the back of his neck and thumb brushing his collarbone, the other holding a book open roughly a quarter of the way through.  
  
“Turns out I rather like this Eulenspiegel man,” Jack says, passing him a mug of water from the dresser. James swallows a mouthful or two, and stretches to put it back himself.  
  
“I’ll bet you do,” he replies, voice hoarse.   
  
“Though it’s an interesting book for a  _Commodore_  to have in his very special favourites collection.” Jack waits while James gets more comfortable, resting his head back in the crook of Jack’s shoulder. “Stories about a wicked trickster – one might even go so far as t’say it was incriminating.”   
  
James smiles a little, and reaches out to brush fingers over the worn engraving of an owl and a mirror on the front of the book.   
  
“Not  _entirely_. My childhood nanny was German.” He pauses,  _hem_ s low in his throat and swallows the thick blockage with a tiny grimace, then reaches for the water again. “…Till became my brother and I’s favourite wh-when we were children. William’s fondness for him dissipated over time, but mine has…remained. Though it’s nothing to Theodore’s.” He runs his touch down the sides of the pages, and then Jack’s shirt ties, breath exhausted already. “He always said that, that having a sister who knew exactly what he was thinking half of the time had made him respect a man who had learned to…ah, keep even more tricks up his sleeve than he.”  
  
“Clearly a intelligent man.”  
  
“Indeed.” James chuckles gently, then lays his head back. “How far are you?”  
  
“Going through a spot of tightrope walking, at the moment.”  
  
Nodding, James sips his water, then closes his eyes. “Carry on, then.”  
  
Jack kisses his forehead, his smile curving against James’s skin, and opens the page again, beginning to read aloud.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**you look lovely**  
  
The times when Jack comes to James, he always arrives precisely on the day they have pre-chosen, though neither of them really know how long he’ll stay.   
  
James walks to the beach to wait for the  _Pearl_  to appear on the horizon. He sits cross legged on the sand, writes or draws (terrible) sketches in the journal he brought with him to the village the very first day; repairs nets spread out on the sand around him with three or four other villagers whose language he has become more proficient at. Rolls the coin through his fingers, digging the edges under his nails and smoothing his thumb over the face.   
  
On every instance of meeting Jack again, no matter where, he always feels the same small jolt. To see him, to see him go, to be the one leaving -  _always_  palpable, in a different way to other sensations. His chest throbbing, heart heavy as wet sand. It’s the same for Jack, only worse (only better). Fast, hard kisses, slow hands.   
  
It’s been nearly a year and a half now, since he took the coin. He is still himself in all of his memories and experience, imagines this keeps him the same James Luke Norrington, but every day this has come to feel a little like slipping into clothes that someone else was wearing hours before. Touch now is like as with limbs he has slept on. Thick, and far away.  
  
He starts to leave the village. Undeniably he has become restless, and walks the half-mile up the beach to where the  _Morglay_  is anchored. It’s foolish sailing her all by himself, but with a lot of effort he manages. He doesn’t exactly have much to fear, nor is he in any rush. He can wait out bad weather if it comes.  
  
He stops in ports and harbours, explores the nearby coasts. The first time he is with Jack, the next he is  _meeting_  Jack, but on later occasions he travels alone. He’s still careful, but knows that there is not much chance of people recognising him anymore. Not with his hair loose and his clothes plain and worn (though still clean), the earring back in his ear and his gaze the only thing that is any older.   
  
Nights, wherever they are, he keeps the curtains firmly drawn, even when alone. He’s gotten used to changing, but is not exactly going to invite it to happen without his being aware of it.   
  
Jack doesn’t care and makes sure that he knows it, but James stays constant on that.   
  
In the next winter, James goes with Jack when he takes the  _Pearl_  north – unusual and that’s probably why, to remain somewhat unpredictable – though, for him that’s meant to be the norm, so “Hang on. Perhaps I oughtn’t…” Jack standing on the deck literally stroking his chin, twisting his fingers into the braids as he frowns over it - James rolling his eyes and elbowing him.   
  
Then they hear about Boston, where the Charles River has iced over so thickly that men and horses can cross it, and head back south.   
  
In Honduras, in the summer, he catches his own story being related by a Navy officer on a stroll with his wife. He stops walking in alarm, stilling as they pass - turns away and raises his arm to shade his eyes from the sun as everyone else is. To blend in. And on one occasion, near Florida, he thinks that he spots Theodore. Although he then recognizes that it is not, that this man has blue eyes and grey streaking his hair, James still has to duck down a shaded alley and lean back against the wall to wait for his heart to slow to its usual lethargic pulse, having leapt suddenly to a drum beat not unlike that heard in the Fort of Port Royal every day.  
  
The lengths that he is away get longer. The little girl ( _I think that one’s basically **yours**_ , Jack points out with a chuckle), Antusha, reaches nine. James had been teaching her the plaits he and her father and the other men use on the nets – she has them all over her head the next time he comes back.  
  
Jack remains a pirate, and that is that. Always and forever tip your hat  _amen_. James would never have expected him to change anyway, and he doesn’t, except that he is (as he puts it) “a bit subtler”. And besides, parts of the trade are starting to die down in places, he says.   
  
He has a new scar on his upper arm, but even as time seems to be both speeding up and slowing down at once (James irritated at an inability to think of it in any less hackneyed a way, simply because it  _is_ ), Jack never seems to look any different.   
  
Git.   
  
He also still hears from Will and Elizabeth, infrequently. Letters reach him passed hand by grubby hand, favours cashed in to get them to places he does not go back to for months. He gets to see them eventually, a flying ( _”literally, practically by the seat of me breeches I was in and out of the chair so fast_ ”) visit. They have a chubby baby who had stared almost unblinkingly at his tattoos the whole time, he tells James, and possibly another on the way – though that last bit he didn’t take for certain since it came from a somewhat drunk man in Mexico who was the…what was it now, cousin of the brother-in-law of the sister of the woman who was a maid for the house one down from the Governor’s, and knew Elizabeth’s past maid, Estrella. Who’s married now, bloke had begun, and the whole family were  _so_  proud – and that was where Jack had jumped up, clapped the slightly drunk man on the shoulder and made his swift escape.   
  
Governor Swann is still going strong in Port Royal. Jack also relates the fact that Elizabeth had rushed to the shoreline and shouted after to pass on that Theodore is married and settled as well, though he couldn’t catch anything more.   
  
He’s got no news of Anthony at all.  
  
In a bright October, they meet in Cuba, of all places.  _Getting cocky?_  Jack had asked when James had suggested it in early August.  _Getting indifferent_ , James had thought. The tail of a storm passes and catches them a night they spend on the  _Pearl_  - howls past, scooping the sea into the air and throwing it around. For a short while it rocks the ship, and  _indifference_  goes out of the cabin window when it gaps, banging open against the sides. Snap out and back.  
  
The latch was not shut firmly enough, perhaps, the  _Pearl_  tips a little further than normal, the glass creaks, the curtains flick open. And sod’s law (gods’ law) sends in a shaft of the tiny crescent moon, shooting across the cot like an arrow.   
  
It’s the kind of situation that has led James to believe, quickly, that the Heathen Gods became dissatisfied with no pirates ensnared in their curse. That they decided when he took a coin that they would play with him instead; test his worthiness to have taken it.   
  
He is, of course (because when else would they choose) kissing Jack, draped over him on the bed with Jack’s hands around his back, cupping his shoulderblades - draped over softness and heat which is peripheral but he  _knows_  it’s there, if he can just get to it. Something he can just about touch before it goes away, but that’s better than nothing and he wants it so much his teeth are clenching, mouth pressed to Jack’s.  
  
Jack’s eyes are open, hands sliding down to soothe him, try to coax him closer -- and at  _last_ , at last he's starting to feel warmth and want hook in his belly and— flash of sudden light across Jack, and they and it and everything stops. Grind, halt.   
  
Then snap off and back.   
  
And oh…god what, oh Jesus please not— oh, fuck, Jack,  _no_ —  
  
Jack had been holding the wing of a shoulder _bone_ , not skin. James’s hair had been fluttering loosely on his skull, his fingers covered by just a little flesh, the knuckles white. As always he'd still had his eyes but even though they’d sat loosely in the sockets Jack’s had been wider, are still wider now, staring at him in a moment of shock at the sudden loss of his weight – oh  _god_ , it was just for a second,  _barely_  a second, but, and. What sensation there was rushes back absolutely, flesh again and he and Jack have this shockhorror stillness. Jack huffs a startled breath through his nose without apparently meaning to - he looks guilty right away - and James has to -- wants to hide. The coldness floods back into his limbs.   
  
“Oh—” He jerks back, scrambling. He wants to yell, or be sick, or just get far away so that Jack doesn’t have to look at him. Slice at something with his sword and punch the deck until the splinters bite into his knuckles.   
  
He tries to get up and off the cot, his head down. Jack’s quick hands manage to snatch out and get hold of him, by the biceps.   
  
He grips  _hard_.   
  
“James.”   
  
He stares at the floor. Almost dizzy from it, almost ill.  
  
“James, darling, look at— damn it.” Jack sits up and tugs him round. He hunches his shoulders and flicks his eyes to Jack, and then back down.   
  
“I…don’t even know how to begin to apolo—“  
  
“Don’t you bloody  _dare_.”  
  
Jack throws himself over him, wrapping him up in an embrace, and he stiffens in surprise at the legs sliding over his own and the hand going straight to curve around his neck, the forehead suddenly pressing hard to his own. “I was there when you took it, James, you do  _remember_  that? It’s fine,” Jack tells him seriously, holding his head still so that he maintains eye contact. “’s alright.”   
  
“Jack, it is  _not_  fine.”   
  
“Yes it is.” Jack strokes his hand down over James’s back, sitting back now that he is sure James won’t bolt. “It was…odd, for a second, but I've seen worse. Bet you have too, ay?”  
  
James decides not to try and answer, just shakes his head helplessly. Jack pauses, looking at him, kisses him and urges him to lay down again.   
  
He resists only to go and close the window firmly, before getting back in next to Jack. They're clothed and the bed is warm but he can't feel it.  
  
Jack tangles legs with his, rests his head on James’s shoulder, and runs the back of his knuckles down the side of James’s neck. And he can't feel it. Bone-deep instead he feels a splinter has started, a crack or an echo somewhere in his gut that's tiny, but will grow. A strange sort of disconnection.  
He does his best to soothe Jack as well in return, but .  
  
Not long after, Anamaria gets herself a ship and her own crew, at last, takes her leave of Jack (and his oldest bottle of rum) and sails for Africa. She turns and storms back up the ramp the second she has stepped off the  _Pearl_  though, to fiercely kiss Jack, and leaves him a plaited lock of her hair. He makes it into a bracelet and wears it on days he thinks he needs good luck. He has some of James’s, too, twisted around a bit of green thread from that old shawl and a length of lace he stole off a Navy jacket dropped onto the floor of the  _Green Mermaid_ ’s rentable room long ago, all twisted up into a ring he wears around the thumb of his left hand.  
  
The next time Jack comes to the village, he relates that Marty got syphilis and died up near Antigua. Lambert took it badly and stopped cooking completely, for a while.   
  
“They hated each other, didn’t they?” James frowns over the covers he is throwing onto the bed for Jack, when told. Jack smiles. “Aye, but that doesn’t always mean you don’t  _like_  each other.”   
  
“You mean they…”   
  
“Oh, bugger me, no. No no.” Jack shakes his head vehemently, elflocks whipping around his head. “Just…er, competitive acquaintances.” His left eye twitches.  
  
Gibbs is still around: much greyer in the past couple of years, but he has remained stout. Unprompted by anything in particular, James opts to stay on the  _Pearl_  for nearly a month in a spring around Portobello. Upon catching up with them, he and the  _Morglay_  are battered already – it’s been nearly seven months since he’s been back to the village, and this is the first time in five that he’s seen Jack.  
  
One night he drinks with Gibbs and Jack until moonrise, the three engaging in smattered, easy conversation. Gibbs seems a little distant and when James goes bone he wonders if it is because Joshamee laments the waste of rum, dripping through and pinging on his bones. It’s a vaguely musical pattern, obscure, reminds him idly of the piano he ruined when he was 9 after he and William had been politely introduced to guests in their nightclothes at a party. He’d tripped over the glittering train on his mother’s dress and knocked into the piano, spilt the bottle of wine standing on it, and watched his father’s face turn purple as the sharp liquid ran down into the back and spilled out through the gaps between the keys.   
  
He feels like that now, only with rum – except then again, he thinks absently, perhaps it should be white, because now when he looks that’s all he seems to see. White skin – translucent, almost - white bones, hard nails. Even his eyes feel paler, more piercing now than any ‘Commodore’ look he had ever perfected.  
  
But Gibbs doesn’t bat an eyelid at him, only turning a little to the splashing of the rum on the deck. Doesn’t even look at James when he frowns and attempts to catch some as a sort of apology, holding the bottle where his navel ought to be, and that’s when he realises that Gibbs is going blind.   
  
Doesn’t make much difference on the  _Pearl_ , since he knows it as well as James has come to know his coin, but any other captain would have forced him off.   
  
Jack is fonder of that old sailor than he’ll admit.   
  
The next day James notes that Cotton has become fiercely protective of him, too.  
  
“One old mute pirate with a parrot to voice his opinions, and another that is blind.” He leans back on the mainmast, folding his arms and distractedly brushing his fingers over the lump of the coin in his waistband, watching Cotton gently do the same to the back of Gibbs’ neck to warn him of the swinging boom in the midst of two or three newer crew members James does not entirely recognise. “That makes about as much sense as—“  
  
Jack comes up behind him, slinging arms about his hips and resting his chin on his shoulder. “You an' me, I’d have said.”  
  
He stills. “Oh, bloody  _hell_.” Sighs, groans. “I should have seen that one coming a mile off.”  
  
“Mmm, and here I thought Gibbs was the one going blind.” Jack nudges him with his forehead playfully and tugs him away.  
  
Since that one time, though it was…unexpected, at the end, they’ve done their best to never let him slipping to bone unexpectedly happen again. They succeed, but for one occasion. And James knows little about the Aztecs, but is dreaming of them when it happens.   
  
He’s back in the village, with Jack come for a few days. They’re sleeping, and it’s a hugely hot summer, sticky and cloying, reminiscent of when he was first on the  _Pearl_. Though James does not actually experience the weather anymore, per se, his  _body_  has continued what Jack calls an  _up yours_  – he’s sweating (which he  _still_  finds so strange, he’s  _dead_ ), but his minor concerns are nothing to Jack’s. He’s kicked all the covers from the uneven bed in a fit against the heat, even knotted his hair back with some twine in what Anamaria woud glare at and call a somewhat hypocritical move. But the mere hint of moon, so little that his blood feels still and calm, the cover of the trees, have given James confidence, and the door remains ajar.   
  
Jack is lying next to him, pressed, despite the heat, to the length of his back with one arm looped loosely over his waist. Chin braids (with " _alright I admit there might be a hint, a **hint**  of grey in the left one"_ – but James only noticed because he knows Jack so well, because he looks for change in others, now, as there’s nothing terribly exciting to watch on himself except fading out) and breath on the back of James’s neck.   
  
It’s difficult to call it a dream, because he’s never had anything like it. More an assault, with purpose - whirls of disorganized shapes, whirls of colour, all flashing through blackness as lights over water.   
  
He gets a sense, like breathing in, of  _space_  but held between something very old, between cupped palms, between stone temples looming tall over one shoulder, and soil underfoot just like here. The reflection of flames on a sweaty, dark bicep, bright feathers tangled into black hair, and everything hot and loud and rhythmic, hands up and fingers curling – around their kin’s hands in return, around weapons, around tools, around air full of dancing sparks and seeds and rips of wind. Alive, alive. Whites of eyes, voices yelling and humming and singing, turning pounding soft as the soles of feet on earth, red and green and yellow and  _absolute_  blue - on walls illuminated for a drum beat, on necks and arms and shoulder blades, and he shifts in bed at the scream of knife edges and drum beats and laughter and spilled blood. Sacrifice, death, birth, bodies bones ages and lives and faces held high all the way through it all.   
  
The coin seems determined that he should share in something, too. In everything, everything. The coin tells him to revel, to celebrate, to look at this, to  _respect_. It  _demands_  it.  
  
The door opens further, quiet as sunrise, and as he turns in Jack’s arms he ripples and is bone.   
  
Jack’s eyes blink and open, him close enough that lashes flicking up against James’s lack of nose. Silence presses uncomfortable fingers to the exposed bumps of his locked spine, then the wind whispers again, the door replies, the moon shutters its eyes and nods and draws away with it. He returns.   
  
He opens his lips and starts to apologise. Jack clamps a hand across his mouth (it’s become a bit of a move, with them).   
  
“Don’t,” he hisses. “Don’t.” Lets off, and shrugs a little. “Your hipbones are always diggin’ into my arse anyway.”   
  
James is still, and then he drops his head and nudges it into Jack’s hand, closing his eyes as the touch brushes down and cups his jaw, thumb gently stroking his eyelid.  
  
He wants to keen.   
  
There are many reasons why.  
  
Antusha stands up past his elbow, the next time he returns.  
  
  
  
  


**i intend to see**  
  
They walk properly though the village the day after, together. James insists on it.  _Insisting_ , yes, again. To Jack’s raised eyebrows when he returns from a swim to find him dressing, he continues straightening his shirt with one hand, the other on the corner of the dresser, and lifts his chin. ”Sod you, insisting is my new forte.” For a little while. It’s always been that if he presses (himself or others) it gets done. This is his plan. This is as far as he can plan, but anything is better than nothing.  
  
Jack is perfectly scandalous. He wraps his arm around James’s waist the moment they’re out of the door, hums as they walk, turns his cheek to touch James’s once or twice to mutter comments on things they’ve passed. Their hips are pressed close enough that James fears he might be swaggering as well (though the swaying might be the dizziness, Jack is most certainly playing a part), and he doesn’t know whether to laugh or flush or elbow Jack off.   
  
Is Jack a help or a hindrance, then?   
  
Oh a help. A help.  
  
His walk is loose, it’s ridiculous, and Jack is carefully aiding him and carefully not. He’s a resting post, then he’s resting against –- he spins out to point up, to point down, spins back to step them both out of the way of a group of children suddenly running full pelt down one street. A boy stops to stare at his hair – he bends with a flourish and lets the child tug his beads. Points to James, standing back, in the shade of a row of houses covered in sweet smelling blue flowers, and announces in English but with  _unmistakable_  gestures, that they were his idea.   
  
Cozumel is a small place, poor but vibrant, full of colour. Every house front is covered in vines or flowers or pots, rugs hanging out of windows; the streets are dusty but he keeps his chin up and breathes the sharper sea air over the top. Women bustle and sing, fishermen pass with catches over their shoulders, salt water glistening on skin.   
  
They pass a doorway and a hot blast that makes him stumble in surprise. Inside is an oven, and smoke, and a round man pounding equally round dough.   
  
“I’m alright,” he tells Jack, and pauses. Moves to a side window where it’s cooler, keeping his distance, but goes close enough that he can inhale the smell.   
  
Fresh baked bread.  
  
Jack goes up to the window, eyeing the frame, then leans in and steals a still warm roll, the dough having been roughly plaited before baking. He bounces it off his elbow and James catches it – and scolds, _insists_  he put it back.   
  
“James.  _Pirate_.”  
  
“Jack.  _Principles_.”  
  
They bicker gently over it, passing the roll back and forth and leaving crumbs everywhere. The baker stares, his wife comes down and joins him, until finally she passes another through the window silently and closes the shutter.   
  
He vomits when they get home, into their washbasin, and sits weakly on the floor with his back against the bed while Jack gets fresh water from the well. Threatening to spoil the day, but no. It was still worth it.  
  
They sit outside on the baked grass as the sun starts to go down into the trees, watching what they can see of the  _Pearl_  and the strip of glittering water, the shapes on the beach painted yellow, red as the cover James brought out, then black. Jack drinks rum and eats - the rest of the bread, cold meat, and then things James does not entirely recognise but he seems to like, licking his fingertips and grinning sideways through the twilight. James sips water, swallows against the urge to cough, shudders, and carries on with his face turned stubbornly out to sea.   
  
The following evening, James is alone when Benito and Maria visit, delivering some more food and candles. Fresh bread. Gibbs had come by earlier, stuck his head round the door with a couple of bottles and tried to get them to both come have a drink, good cheer and talk. Reckoned he could rustle up Anamaria from whatever “that woman” was doing, too. James had bitten his tongue against the snapped comment of spirits being wholly  _unable_  to cure his ailment, and declined, but told Jack that he should go.  
  
Now, he has told  _himself_  that he can still get up and take a walk about without aid. He’d hoped to go down and along the beach, perhaps meet Jack on the way back. He’s got about as far as the wall by the window when Benito knocks gently on the door and comes in, followed by Maria, calling quietly for Jack. They see James and stop, arms full.  
  
“Señor Norrington,” Benito says, glancing back at Maria. He nods at them, drawing his robe around himself. The two shift uncomfortably, until Maria steps forward. “Are—” she pauses, rich voice unused to halting English but wanting to try. “Are you well?”  
  
Benito winces. She winces. James winces a little, for her.   
  
“Ah…I mean…I—I am not meaning—”  
  
He holds a hand out up to quiet her. “It’s fine, Miss. I know what you meant.” He hopes that they understand what he’s saying, thinking it likely, but he musters a smile from somewhere to help put across his meaning just in case. She gives him one back, hands clasped together. Benito hangs in the doorway.  
  
“Could I perhaps…trouble you to pass me that shirt, if you will?” He gestures to it, behind her, licking his lips and willing the crackles in his lungs to  _stop_  for just a moment so he can catch his breath.  
  
She looks over her shoulder, making a quiet ‘oh’ noise, and grabs it from the back of the chair by the bed. Makes to cross to him eagerly – he flattens himself back against the wall automatically. “Not too close.”   
  
She stops, stills completely, and her eyes go impossibly sad. She extends her arm to him; he takes it and manages to remove the robe and pull it slowly on over his head, refusing to let himself use the support of the wall too much. It’s not very clean, but it’s better than these breeches he'd tugged on whilst still lying down in the bed, even as the sound of Jack and Gibbs’ voices were fading away down the hill. These can’t have been washed for days.  
  
“Thankyou,” he says. “Gracias.”  _Now go. Go._  
  
She inclines her head politely, then bites at her lip, glancing back at her father. “You are…ah, taking a walk?”  
  
He sets his jaw angrily - not really at her, at himself, because he has to slip one arm behind his back, using the old posture to flatten his palm on the stone and hold himself steady. “Yes. I…thought I would go down to the water. See the ship.”   
  
She nods, and looks at her father, who frowns hard at her from underneath his huge eyebrows. She sucks at her lip again, through the gap in her teeth, frowns then turns back to James. “Senor Norrington, I would…I would please you accompany me?” She raises her arm to the position he always suspected Elizabeth Swann hated having to do. “My legs are…stiff, again. Ache? Old wounds.” She smiles at him, spots of colour on her cheeks.  
  
He stares a moment, in surprise. Curls his fingers against the uneven wall. “I…really couldn’t.”  
  
She steps in. “Please?”  
  
“No, I must insist you go, I will be quite alright alone.”  
  
Benito, staring from the door, clears his throat. “Maria,” he says, not unkindly, but carefully.   
  
She hisses under her breath and whirls. “Papa…” And so begins a tirade in Spanish that James can barely follow at all. He catches his name, and Jack’s, and something about…money, debts. He considers the possibility that Jack’s off gambling something extravagant away and she’s desperately trying to distract him, for a minute, until he remembers that Jack doesn't gamble at all, and it clicks. She turns back to him, and a language barrier can have nothing to a perfectly readable look. Determination on her face, most of all. James keeps thinking of Elizabeth, around her, and he hates it.  
  
She rests her hand on James’s arm, and that's all. Same as Jack, neither assisting clearly but there if he desires. He looks at her sideways. She looks carefully forwards.  
  
The beach is mostly empty, just the last fishermen mooring their boats and heading home. The sun is starting to set deep pink and red over the water, leaving a sparkling, burning path from the beach right out to itself. Maria doesn’t trouble him with conversation, and he’s grateful. She speaks now and then of landmarks, the places she knows, and leaves him standing just by the water’s edge to wander a little into it, standing half calf deep. The bottom of her skirt spreads out in the tide, absolute blue on the sea stained dark coral underneath. James thinks of the jars of water his father had in his study, to clean his paintbrushes whenever "a creative occasion" had taken him. On the windowsill, in the light.  
  
They hear Gibbs and Jack before they see them – mostly Gibbs, in fact, heading back for the village and singing loudly. Jack stops as Gibbs meanders merrily on ahead, following the path back towards the village, seeing he and Maria silhouetted against the sun and bright water. He throws his arms up, cries out a greeting, and heads straight to them, except for it  _not_  being a straight line in the least. James raises an eyebrow at how much sand he flicks up as he goes.  
  
When he's by James, he sees that Jack's eyes are rimmed with red as well as kohl, and sighs inwardly. He’s got roaring drunk and there’s little-to-no chance that James will be able to guide him back to the house. But Jack just stops in front of him, turns his feet in and out until his boots are half covered. Smiles a bit. “Runnin' off, are we?”  
  
James pauses, to breathe in (suddenly painful, constricted, sharp), and out. “…In a manner. I came to see the water. Maria was most…insistent that she accompany me.”  
  
“ _Insistent_ , you say.” Jack’s mouth curves.  
  
James makes a non-committal sound, curling his toes in the sand. Jack laughs, and hooks fingers into James’s waistband, and ducks to kiss his throat.   
  
“I’m going to take a swim,” James says, and Jack stills with his lips on the movement of James’s voice.  
  
“Swim?” He pulls back. “Are y’sure that’s a good idea, love?”  
  
“I don’t care.”   
  
Jack blinks, and makes as if to protest further. James interrupts. “No, I don’t. I want to swim. I miss the water. Don’t tell me it’s stupid because I know that you know how that feels." He turns away and heads towards the water.   
  
Jack catches his arm.   
  
“Let go of me.”  
  
“Nope.”   
  
“Jack. Let.  _Go_.” He looks forwards, at the horizon. Refuses to pull, or be pulled, but Jack steps up next to him and says "Sorry, but I'm not goin' to" and he does wrench and that  _hurts_  but there is the edge of something rising in him, hot and spilling, and here is the overflow. "God  _damnit_  Jack, I’m  _not_  incapable yet and until I am, I will come and swim." Jack makes to answer and he interrupts "I am  _going_  to swim every day and if it is bad for me - if I die in the water then so be it, it’s how I always thought I would, so just  _let me be_. You will not change my mind.”  
  
“I’m not tryin’, you wanker.”   
  
He turns at that. Jack is kicking his boots off, throwing them further up the beach. He looks back to James and doesn’t flinch at the light bouncing off the water, or James’s hard stare.  
  
“I’m allowed t’worry about you," Jack says. Dangerous and quiet himself. "Don’t tell me you don’t understand that ‘cause I know y’do. And  _don’t_  tell me you don’t want me to ‘cause y’know I’ll just do it anyway.” He stands, saying nothing, and is actually still.  
  
James swallows just as another wave breaks quietly. He nods even as the arm is sliding around his waist.   
  
They walk into the water; still warm from the day's heat, a gentle current here. Maria is wading back out towards them. Jack entreats her to stay but she ducks her head, glancing into the water (finds it hard to resist Jack anything, James thinks, and knows that feeling) and starts to say that she must go. But stops.   
  
“Señor Norrington…” She points at his right calf, bared, pale in the sea. “You have marks.” She jerks her head up, stares at him. “You are scarred too!”  
  
He is. No-one knows those, really, except Jack and Theodore. Stockings made him look more respectable in more than one way. He finds a smile for her, and it's real. “Yes. Not quite the same, though.”   
  
Stepping backwards into coral on a beach when he was younger, blinder. Blood spilling out and curling in the water as dark as it, darker; the rocks and shapes rough both ways. It was something he always thought of, whenever anyone spoke of balance, of poise. He’d needed to move, seeing his blood already attracting more fish, expecting larger, but he couldn’t tug, he couldn’t hurry, he couldn’t rush. Be slow, just lift his legs, step carefully free. Each was one a risk, each one had to be thought about, each had consequence in a way it hadn't before.   
  
Jack speaks after Maria has gone; after she’d listened to James and looked down and then back up, smiled at him, and laughed, and left them on the beach. They are waist deep, the sun now dipping below the level out in front of them, still heat though the shape of the moon is pale and high in the edge of the sky.  
  
“Ought to be an exercise at Navy training, that,” Jack says, ducking down to somehow manage to float on his back, sash rippling on the surface red as the rays.   
  
“That’s a touch barbaric, don’t you think?” James counters. He smoothes his hands through the water, cups his palms to catch the colour and washes his face, rubs some over the back of his neck. Jack, toes gripping into James’s (Jack’s?) breeches, moving gently away and back with the swell, watches.  
  
“From what I hear most of it is already.”  
  
James shadows his eyes with a hand, to look at him. “Oh indeed?”   
  
“Well, y’know sailors.” Jack waves a wet hand, then folds his arms behind his head. James sits back, shoulders just above the surface; settles on the sand with his legs out, knees bent and just breaking back through.  
  
“Besides,” Jack continues, continuing to float next to him. “Happened to you, an’ you turned out alright.”  
  
“You mean this?” he asks, quietly.   
  
Jack turns. Moves to his knees, and wraps himself around James like an eel; arms around his chest, chin on his shoulder.   
  
“Aye, mate." He laces his fingers through James's, and smiles. "All of it.”

 


	7. Chapter 7

  
**into sharp focus**  
  
He’s stopped breathing.  
  
Wouldn’t be much point to it, really, being sat on the sea floor about a fathom and a half down.   
  
With his shoulders resting against part of the anchor of the  _Morglay_ , her recently careened bottom is a bobbing brown shape in the right of James’s vision – he’s  _looking_ , however, away from where the sand slopes slowly up to the coast of Panama. Staring back out into the even deeper water, legs stretched out in front of him with one knee slightly up and his hands in his lap. Here is the feeling of the sea pressing lightly to him, holding him in it, light current, tip, roll.  
  
Though the coin means that he can stay underwater indefinitely it has never given him miraculously better vision. The water still makes everything hazy, indistinct. His skin is almost eerily pale down here, hands and bare feet and chest nearly glowing, the sensation of the water against his open eyes still a little strange even though it’s not the first time he’s stayed like this underneath. It did wonders last time he was working with the men from the village. They’d never brought in hauls like it.  
  
He  _can_  see that the sea gradually gets darker the deeper it goes, to a block of thick blackblue where everything blends together and becomes impenetrable. The sun is a yellow-white shimmer on the surface, broken up by the wash of an occasional wave of foam. It filters down through the water in many places; he knows his toes are in one beam of light, but he can only really pick it out because it’s so close. All other details are smudged out of focus. The small area of coral that the anchor is caught in looks simply like grey and redorange masses, some plants wavering in the gentle currents, the fish moving in them indistinct bright shapes lacking any sharp features. Even his hands look different. Everything is thick and misshapen and blurred.   
  
He fits in.  
  
He has wondered, since the first time, if Barbossa’s old crew felt anything similar to this in the water. The same struggle within themselves – every old instinct in their body straining to breathe, but then not to breathe, to swallow and gasp and gulp, not stay still; a desperate flood of wanting to kick up and thrash and move. The first time he did it, the  _pressure_  of it inside his chest reminded him so much of his previous illness that it unsettled him even more than the fact that he was walking on the bottom of the sea.  
  
It’s actually the lack of air in his lungs that keeps him down, balancing out his weight and allowing it. It’s got to be ironic, somehow, he isn’t sure.  
  
He rests his head back against the metal of the anchor top. It’s so quiet, down here. He isn’t able to pick up anything more than what he was already hearing – the muffling, slight throb of the sea in his ears and the slow, slow movements of his heart underneath, amplified and echoing. The edges of his shirt are twisting gently in the water, the same with some of his hair. He doesn’t need to worry about sharks, either. To them his flesh is long dead; they swim wide, lazy circles past him, the tips of their tailfin flicking as if with disdain.  
  
The coin is the only thing on him that is not apparently affected, hasn’t changed. It never does. The face is somewhat scratched but nevertheless he can still pick out the lines of the slashed grin when he draws it out of his waistband to look at, the shape of it exactly the same, brutal and rough like coral. In this way it is similar to him, since to a point his shape remains constant as well, never aging, and he used to find something reassuring in that constancy but now he doesn’t. He can’t.   
  
He  _hates_  it.   
  
He hates it.  
  
And yet. And yet and  _yet_. It’s like he’s tied to it, or it to him; he keeps it by him less out of a concern for losing it than out of habit, now, an old habit bordering on obsession and far too much contemplation of life for a man who is by all rights dead. He clings to it like he’d clung to the hope of the continuation of life. ‘Life’. Now his fingers have gone numb and soon he feels there’ll be nothing to him but salt and thin bone. Jack’s touch will pass through him, and neither of them will be surprised.  
  
What does it say about a man that he’d still take the latter not to have to face death again.  
  
The coin  _feels_  heavier, as though it has absorbed the water. He is that way as well. Yet drained at the same time – just…stuffed to bursting with space and losing everything else at the same time. It would make him want to fidget, if he had the energy.  
  
A swarm of fish pass, yellows and blues and reds flicking past. He watches their colours dart deeper into the water and then there is a sound; a suckingbreakingslosh and the sun is bouncing frantically around – he looks up too see a long dark shape breaking through the surface and moving down towards him.   
  
Jack.   
  
He curls his fingers over the coin and watches Jack swimming powerfully down to him, arms and legs first as curls of dark liquid, almost as though someone had just tipped a bottle of ink into the water. Then the qualities of his body come together, clearing up as he nears; elbows, belt, hair. It strikes James that his kicks, the strong sweeps of his arms, are like a bird diving, the loose sleeves of his shirt like wings, and then he is reaching up to catch hold of Jack’s forearm and guide him down. Jack coils in and drops, bumps into the sand and sends a cloud up as he lands partly on James’s lap. Their noses knock each others’, a couple of bubbles escaping from Jack’s and popping on their top lips.   
  
Jack snorts at the sensation (more bubbles and water, a muffled sound), settling back to sit on the sand between James’s thighs with a tight grip on his shoulder to stop himself floating up again. Somewhat clumsily grabbing the front of Jack’s breeches, James manages far more easily to reach behind himself with his other hand, wrapping it around the anchor chain to ground them both.   
  
And. No explorers or philosophers or writers or poets he has read have ever touched upon attempting to make eye contact underwater with your lover. He can’t be entirely sure Jack is focussing properly on his eyes, but this close he can see enough – the shape of his gaze, cheeks, mouth. He realises that Jack is moving, that, actually, he’s saying something, purely because he can see dull flashes of teeth in the relative shadow of the water (sudden reminder of home, of lighthouses), but he cannot make it out and shakes his head, moves his hand from the chain for a second to press over Jack’s mouth and make him stop, save his air. Jack does, turning his head sideways, and instead he just looks - with admirable success - at James, hair fanning out. James really wants to fidget, now.   
  
Something presses against his fist where he grips the front of Jack’s breeches and almost startles him, before he recognises the press of a thumb. He makes to loosen his fingers but Jack has already sidled and slipped his easily into James’s grip ( _and practise makes profit and far less bother from you upstanding types_ ) to effortlessly pull out the coin. A moment of true surprise he finds oddly and distantly satisfying, and Jack’s frown surfaces strongly enough for James to see it. His expression is asking James if he’s…no, not asking him, because he isn’t stupid and they both know already. It’s not the first time he’s done it, and no, and yes he’s down here because of that. He’s not alright. Yes. No. He’s not.   
  
Jack pushes the coin back into his waistband, clumsily brushes a thumb over his cold mouth. James ducks his head past it to press his face up under Jack’s chin, hooking him closer. He can feel the taut muscles of Jack’s neck, the breath held in the back of his throat; he swallows and – oh god-damn it, wraps an arm around Jack fiercely for a second as he shivers. Jack presses against him, which is like holding him up, their hands crushed between them and Jack’s heart thumping there as well, the water still in their ears.   
  
James pulls back and kisses him. Jack breathes out into his mouth in surprise and wastes his air, a hot rush as their lips slide wetly, grips going to jaws and slipping, and James exhales Jack’s breath back for him, along with the flat one he had been holding somewhere deep in his lungs as well.   
  
He tightens his arm around Jack’s waist, and lets go of the anchor chain with the other.   
  
They kick off the floor towards the surface at the same time.  
  
  
  
  
  


 **where your heart lies**  
  
And he breathes, he chokes, he sleeps, he dreams of water.   
  
All he dreams of is water.   
  
Jack jokes that he’s thirsty. He doesn’t laugh and neither does Jack, really; mostly because he is, he always is, but in his sleep (increasingly broken, too dark; half of the time he wakes without knowing he’d slipped out of cognisance again and he’s spending far less time up or out, instead just breathing cotton off the covers and thinking about how) his dreams have him opening his mouth to speak and finding that his tongue is made of water. Or, Jack’s wrapping him in it; cords of surf rolling and twisting back as a wave top that he loops carefully, deft and fast and slippery, smoothing fingers down his ribs and his face with a smile as well. It’s comfortable, not like the ones it seems are around him when he coughs - snapping and tightening like wet leather in the sun, no, these leave foam against his sides and on his jaw; layers on layers that start to cover his mouth and face.  
  
The last time he was walking under the sea. All there were were tall ships on the sand; cracked and sunken and rotted away where the sun doesn't reach. Creaking a little in the currents, rocking and going back to still, the sound was of them breathing. Like him. Some were on their sides, decks spilled out, others had landed on their keels with topmasts pointing up and rags of sail and dust the only contrast to black, black, in the beams of dim sunlight above.  _Dust_. As though he were out on the land. He breathed without difficulty down there, inhaling water in and out calmly as he surveyed the fleet. It’s  _air_  that’s giving him trouble.  
  
The dreams have changed, but something has always stayed the same. The tides. He was told by an officer when he’d just joined the Navy – before leaving England, even – that.  _There’s a lot of ocean, boy, a world, in fact, but you’ll feel only one tide_. He dreams of the tug and the pull and the two extremes, and each time the tide’s been going further and him with it. He’s up to his neck and he’s under. He walks in without qualm and the waves crest and curl over his fingers to tug and urge him along.  
  
He’d walked to the beach for as long as he could. It was pride, too much pride but he’d been humble up to a point and the closer he got to worse the more it changed. Pushing himself to it until he couldn’t anymore. Perhaps the dreams are manifestations of that longing for the sea he’d expected. It’s just that he thinks the longing is not what he’d anticipated. It has become something else. He had gained Jack, he had felt utterly steadfast in his resolutions to remain just as Jack had (oh so eloquently) professed his own, that this was set in stone, but he’s leaning. Tilting like the shadow on a sundial. He is tipping and falling with the rest of the horizon and the oceans off the edge of the Earth.   
  
He doesn’t want to dry up on this bed in this room with a man who’s already part water, the two of them soaking up all they can of each other before he chokes and gasps and dies. He does not. He wants to remain himself, yes, he is still certain, and. What that has come to mean is this:  
  
He wants to get into the water and not come out again.

 


	8. Chapter 8

**a dawn appointment**  
  
There are two skeletons hanging at Gallows Point. Jack would have nodded silently to them. James stares, then looks away.  
  
Port Royal’s coastline appears the same in the early darkness. A little wider perhaps, that’s all. There’s a new building added right by the harbour; tall, stone. Two new cannons on the Fort have absorbed the sun from the day and are still glowing, two points of hot dark metal on the battlements. James doesn’t see the  _Dauntless_  docked anywhere, just another Navy vessel he doesn’t recognise with a British flag snapping in the early night breeze.  
  
There’s no moon tonight, nor will there be tomorrow.  
  
He brings the  _Morglay_  in deftly and as quietly as possible, sticking close to the sloop that he has shadowed all the way in so as to cover his entrance. He keeps a wide berth from the figures he can see by the unknown vessel, the scattered other people along the jetties – including a group of uniformed soldiers heading back to the beach that startle him for a second. Parting from the sloop instead, he sails to the far left of the harbour where many of the larger ships will disguise his.   
  
He checks the coin in his waistband, then slips out onto the jetty before hurrying up into the trees.   
  
His hair is tied back and plaited loosely, underneath a dark tricorn cocked so low that he is basically looking at his feet. He pushes it up once he is in the woodland, and navigates his way up into the empty backstreets of the town. He can judge the day’s heat from the shimmers still on corners of the cobbles.   
  
Underneath his shirt and dirty brown jacket he has a bracelet Antusha made him the last time he said goodbye to the village; twisted twine and a bone and a conch shell knotted around his left wrist. He hasn’t been back for eight months. Nearly three weeks ago he’d left Jack in Panama and come to Port Royal. Jack knows he’s here, and he knows why. James had made him swear not to risk coming as well. Jack had kissed his dry mouth and promised.   
  
James knows he’s going to run into him somewhere.  
  
He walks past the flour mill, the houses next to it,  _The Captain_  inn where the lights and the noise of the late drinkers inside spill out onto the back wall of the buildings opposite. A left at what used to be the house of Mr and Mrs Claridge (a handsome but fat man with an icy disposition and his wife, who had the smallest hands he’d ever seen on a woman and the odd ability to actually make her husband laugh), now a bookshop of some kind.   
  
The sign over the blacksmith (deserted; both a relief and an irritation) says “M. Smith and W. Turner”, printed carefully underneath the hammer and anvil. He snorts softly.  _Smith_. That was what Jack had bought for Will as a wedding gift, then. He’d never said what.   
  
James crosses the square with a nod to a stumbling drunk that he thinks he vaguely recognises (and thus speeds up his walk), turns right, touches the brim of his hat to two thankfully sober young women that he does not, and walks onto the road that his house used to be on.  
  
The breeze creaks through the trees, following him around the slope where the stones crunch underfoot. Rounding the first curve proper, he pauses on seeing Theodore’s house there as he remembers. White washed, high windows and a tiny patch of garden at the front, a few native shrubs and one or two palms shading the short path. There’s a new gate of wrought iron, and all of the windows are dark.   
  
He pauses, hanging back as though sewn to the thick shadow at the edge of the road. The settings are at once familiar, and not. Scattered stars are out, the sky a thrown bucket of black water over the rest of the town; once his stockings would have been as clean and brightwhite as the papers in his pocket originally were. He remembers standing out against the night while walking home. Thinking of these things now only makes him feel increasingly loose at the seams, made from pieces of the past that jostle against those from his present with no steady line between. He is an incongruous figure, stopped in time  _and_  aged by a future and existence, one that has left no absolute physical mark on him.   
  
And, he is standing in a road like a fool.   
  
He glances back the way he came. It’s quiet and cool and he taps his foot flat against the road for a moment, folding his arms. Right, yes, this was a foolish idea – but he knew that, really. He can hardly stop to ask for directions or news. He should probably have gone to where he knew the Turners were living last, though that would perhaps have been unutterably stupid. At the very least he should have walked straight on past this house, but of course. Of course he could not, and even knew that. This is  _Theodore_.   
  
Who may not live here anymore. Christ, he might not even be alive. Jack hasn’t been able to get any messages from William or Elizabeth for almost a year – why, when James feels so old and has had so little to do, do things still manage to rush up on him?  
  
He sighs needlessly, deciding. He’ll head on to his own house, as he knows best how to get inside without a key. If it’s empty, he’ll slip the papers somewhere into the study – the bookcase, maybe. Even if there’s someone new there, he’ll do it anyway.   
  
He’s become adept at silence.   
  
Chuckling darkly to himself, he walks on up the road.   
  
To think that he was once known for his strategic skills.   
  
His old abode is silent as well, apart from a dim light under the front door – a lantern in the hall, at best guess. The garden is a little overrun, the bushes by the lawn twice as large as when he left. The lawn looks trampled in places. He even raises his eyebrow at that, and is halfway through the open gate to pick his way across the grass before he registers the footsteps behind him. It’s too late to do anything but try and turn without appearing alarmed.  
  
A man, stopped in the road.   
  
For a moment the stranger’s tricorn throws his face into shadow, but when he pulls it off with a jerk, James can see. Open mouth, straight nose. He is the one who makes a sound.  
  
Theodore.  
  
They stand a few metres apart. Theodore is in uniform, bag in hand. A quick glance tells James he’s still a Lieutenant, but then he gets distracted by the carefully crafted moustache Theodore is sporting. Not much surprises him anymore. That…does. Mostly because it suits him. James would smile if he wasn’t doing his best not to sit down very suddenly and Theodore looks as white as James might have turned, once, with the shock. The freckles on the bridge of his nose stand out even more than normal.   
  
“I…” His whisper cracks.   
  
James realises, ridiculously, that he is holding his breath. He stops at once.   
  
Theo licks his lips clumsily. “If I take the four steps to embrace you, will I be holding air?”   
  
James is confused for a second, before realising. His heart thumps once, the spreading dissolve of it echoing in his dry throat. “I’m not a ghost, Theodore.”  
  
“You’re supposed to be,” Theo shudders, drops his bag and strides to James to throw arms around him tightly.   
  
James tries not to stiffen. He mostly succeeds.  
  
He’s grown. Or, James has shrunk. Or…something, but he’s a little broader in the shoulders and there’s a tiny new scar along the line of his jaw that James just has time to spot before that jaw is pressed against his neck. James missed his thirtieth birthday. His hat falls off. He’s shockingly warm. He grips tight. James puts a hand flat on his lower spine. It’s Theodore, it’s Theo, and he smells like salt and sweat and London, underneath.  
  
“I just got back from Cuba,” he says over James’s shoulder, not letting go an inch. “The ship docked an hour ago. We’re early.”  
  
“Would this not be late?” James says, to the tip of his ear.  
  
“I think you would be the one who’s late.”  
  
He pulls back. Ah. Tries. Theodore doesn’t let go.   
  
“...Theo.”  
  
“ _James_. Just hold a bloody moment, will you?”  
  
He can’t help but be uncomfortable. “I—”   
  
“—told me you had consumption and then got stolen away by your secret pirate lover the very same night. Not to mention that said lover was male, a pirate,  _Jack Sparrow_ , and that as far as I had thought, had  _felt_ , you were dead. And you’re not. So you will  _hold_  for a minute, James.”  
  
He isn’t sure his body can take it, this much unexpected  _feeling_ , he fears something will break – but there’s also the same bitter kick for the hundredth,  _thousandth_  time that even overwhelmed with emotions he actually  _isn’t_. Can merely feel like he ought to be dizzy but not  _be_. He closes his eyes for moment, though. It helps in some way, though it makes no sense.  
  
Theodore heaves a great breath and tightens his grip, then looks James over, frowning at his face.   
  
“You look bloody awful.” His eyes flick over James’s palour, how worn he knows he looks. The skin around Theo’s mouth tightens.  
  
James looks straight at him. “I took a coin from the Isle De Muerta the day after Jack came.”  
  
Theodore stills, then blinks, and steps back. “That...was not what I hoped you’d say. However.” He tugs his wig off, scratching the back of his queue and rubbing his thumb along his bottom lip thoughtfully. “Best pirate I’ve ever seen,” he murmurs (repeats), with a little head shake.   
  
James nods carefully. “So it would seem.”  
  
They stand.   
  
“We should go inside,” Theo snaps back to himself, and picks up his bag and hat. He passes, James gets his tricorn and follows, and he’s heading for— “You live in my house?”  
  
Theo turns as he’s walking, pausing just inside the open gate with James a step behind, and lifts the corner of his lips in what ought to be a smile, but doesn’t quite make it. “It’s not your house, James.”  
  
“I—No, I know that.”  
  
Theo lays a hand on his arm. “I know.” He pushes the gate shut behind James with his foot, and continues walking.  
  
“I suppose you needed somewhere bigger.” James stops. “You’re married. I—Congratulations.”   
  
Theodore frowns at him from the front step. “How did you know that?”   
  
“Jack. Sometimes he managed to hear from the Turners.”   
  
He nods, then does smile, and leans back to silently point towards an upstairs window. “She’ll be asleep.”   
  
James moves onto the step with Theo as he turns the key and finally sees the ring on his left hand, curled around the doorknob. “Children?” he blurts. Didn’t mean to, but couldn’t help it.  
  
Theo sags a little against the door and holds James’s eye. “Two.” A part of James’s chest shivers, aches fiercely for a second, but he smiles. Blinks quickly and inclines his head as well. Touches Theo’s arm.  
  
Inside there is indeed a lantern, on a little shelf James never had there, high up on the wall by the stairs. Theo lets him step inside, then gestures for him to close the door as he puts his bag by the foot of the stairs and lifts the lantern down. Treading across the hall carefully into the study, Theo turns up the lantern once they’re inside, closing the door behind them.   
  
It looks almost exactly how James left it, desk in the same place, same curtains. Far fewer books though.  
  
“Much of your stuff was auctioned,” Theodore say, still quietly but above a whisper now. “The desk and the shelves only remained because they were so bloody heavy no-one could move them.” Theo moves across and lights a set of candles, putting them on the desk.The candlelight bathes them in a glow in the centre of the room, shadows dancing up on the edges and making strange storybook shapes on the walls.   
  
“Atfer you disappeared somebody came up with the notion that you’d have left a curse on the house. That was how I could afford it.”  
  
James blinks, then accepts it. Superstitions can be vaguely comforting. “I would probably have left it to you anyway.” He pauses. “You don’t mind the stories?”  
  
“Oh on the contrary. Adds a certain…mystery,” Theo says, sitting up on the desk. “Estrella enjoys extrapolating on them, in fact. Just so you know, you haunt the back garden on Tuesdays and your shirt is terribly ruffled but you still look ever so stern, and even dine with us on special occasions.”  
  
“I…right.”  
  
“Though if she knew I was actually talking to you, she’d…probably faint, actually. She’s really all talk.”  
  
“So you’ve— oh. Oh, bloody hell.” James realises, finally, and wishes he’d sat down. “ _Estrella_.” He shakes his head, chuckles. “Theodore Richard Groves, you married Elizabeth Swann’s ex maid.”  
  
Theodore chuckles. “You remember her, then.”  
  
“Well, I. She had…ah.”  
  
Theo ducks his head, scratching his moustache. James  _knows_  it’s to cover a grin. He folds his arms and clears his throat, even though he hasn’t had to cough for years. “My apologies.”  
  
“Oh Christ, no need.” Waving a hand, Theodore chuckles again. “I well know. She’s a very…proud woman.” He rubs his thumb twice across his smile, quickly. “Speaks her mind.”   
  
James takes a chance to as well. “Tell me about your children,” he says.  
  
“Tell me about Jack Sparrow.”  
  
He glances up in surprise, and Theo’s face is set. Tucking his hands into his pockets, James a finger around the edge of the coin. Scratches it with his nail. “What sordid details do you want first?  
  
High, angry spots of colour flare on Theo’s cheeks. “You  _left_  with him. You— James, you were dying and you fell in love and turns out you took on  _immortality_  to be with the man, do not for a second think that you can just turn up after eight years and expect me not to ask.”   
  
“It wasn’t just to be with him.” James crosses the room to rest against the desk next to Theodore. “It was for me, as well.”  
  
“For yourself.” Theo sighs and reaches over. Runs a finger gently over the tiny braid plaited in behind James’s ear. The earring. “I can’t say I’m terribly surprised,” he says, voice flat. Whispers. “I would have been terrified as well.”  
  
James would like to rub the back of his neck, but stays where he is until Theo lets him be.   
  
“What’s he like?”  
  
“Jack? You must have some ideas. Jack is…” He laces his fingers together, un-laces them again. “To do him justice is impossible, I don’t think that the world has the adjectives. He’s Jack Sparrow – Theo, you know.”  
  
“I didn’t run off with him, though.”  
  
James gives him a sharp, sideways look. “I didn’t  _run_  anywhere.”  
  
“Oh I’m sorry,  _sailed_.”  
  
He can’t help but be amused, but makes the point of outstaring Theo before continuing, looking at the ceiling as he talks.  
  
“I don’t know where I would have begun explaining, before. I’m still none the wiser. He’s Jack. He has such humour and intelligence, underneath. There’s... The way he talks to you with his hands? And he has such an understanding of  _value_ , Theo, he never wastes a thing – not a day, not an…expression. I’ve never seen him be cruel, not once - not in a way that lingered or that was not called for in some manner.” He folds his arms behind him, tucks his fingers underneath the edge of the desk. “I don’t believe there is another person like him in our time. And through six years of ever-fading senses the truth of that, at least, remains as clear as always.”  
  
The silence that follows is one James would be hard pressed to call entirely comfortable, but it’s bearable. They learned as boys to navigate each other’s silences, their best-loved phrases and ways. Theodore twists the ring around his left hand and that habit is new.   
  
“The coin, what’s that—”  
  
“I don’t feel immortal.” It’s a statement, it’s a fact. “Not any more, anyway.”   
  
“You’re going to put it back, aren’t you?” His voice is muffled, his chin on his chest.  
  
“I’m really faced with two choices, as it’s always been two choices, in the end.” James smoothes his jacket sleeve. Repetitive, easy. For one, I can keep it, I can stay, I can continue to cling on to the last vestiges of life by my numbed fingers until there’s nothing to me but salt and bone and this stubborn little whine of terror because some part of me still wants to live, or... For two: I can put it back. I can accept that I am beaten, that I am over and that really I should have been long ago.” He gets up, three steps forward, turns and takes two back— “And what, Theodore, and honestly this is where I have the most trouble and have done for years – what does it say about a man that I’d consider the former just so as not to have to face death again?”  
  
Shuffling on the desk, Theodore doesn’t look as though he can say anything – then suddenly he clears his throat. “You had a funeral, you know.”   
  
“Oh…god.”   
  
“There was no grave, of course, it’s just a stone in the ground.  _Quite_  the event, though.” Theo kicks his heels soundlessly against the desk. “The end of Commodore Norrington, and all.” He bares his teeth in a humourless grin. “The story of what happened on the  _Dauntless_  spread like fire. Jack certainly sorted you out a good back up ending, I’ll give him that. The generally accepted tale is that you and he duelled to the death somewhere. Some say he killed you, some say you killed each other. Of course, some also say you bested him and stole his ship and went to find a cure in Africa.”   
  
James doesn’t know whether to laugh, because it makes  _sense_ , or pace further until this strange sort of dull, hot anger goes away.   
  
“He’s definitely kept his head down, though. There were rumours emerged a year or so later, the captain of some Spanish vessel saying that he’d robbed them, left them half of their booty for their word they’d not tell…oh, and there was a  _possible_  sighting a while back in Trinidad. The only thing that’s for sure is, no English sailors have ever seen him – though we did look, for a while. If any have, he must have found some way to keep their silence. Paid them, perhaps. Or…killed them.” He flicks his gaze carefully sideways to James.  
  
James shakes his head, once. “He wouldn’t have. Not for that.”  
  
A raised eyebrow. “You don’t think he would have killed, for you, after everything else?”  
  
“Oh he’d have killed for me, if he had to. It’s merely that if I wasn’t with him at the time, he wouldn’t have had any reason to do it, not for himself. He’d have found another way.”  
  
“You really love him.”  
  
James turns and looks at Theodore, straight on. “Yes.”  
  
Theo pauses. “…Okay.”   
  
A clock somewhere chimes, softly, breaking any reverie. Theodore glances towards the ceiling unconsciously, then rubs the side of his jaw. “I can’t think what else to tell you, James. There was a small surge in piracy after you left - a celebration, perhaps. We were kept busy. Antony worked especially tirelessly. He took it hard. He really looked up to you.”  
  
James fidgets, just a little. “Did you tell him about Jack?”  
  
“Ohhh no, the news of the illness was enough, for him. I don’t know,” Theo gestures vaguely, “maybe one day. He was a little concerned about the woman you might have left somewhere, for a while, but then he came to the conclusion that it wasn’t any sort of…romance, and turned his attentions back to the sea. He returned to England a couple of years ago. Might get a post out here again, I’m not sure. I’m waiting for his return letter.” He laces his fingers again. “They take an awfully long time.”  
  
“I thought about writing home,” James confides, after a moment. “I thought about  _going_  home, just a…visit, if one can call it that. But that was of course impossible.”  
  
“Governor Swann wrote to your father. So did I. ‘Tragic illness, coupled with unpredictable circumstances.’ You went out as you were, James. Your father is fine. And I believe your brother married.”  
  
He raises his own eyebrow. “Seems as though everyone has been doing that.”  
  
“You started it.”  
  
“Elizabeth and I were barely engaged!”  
  
“Ah, but then you met another…” Theo looks at him from underneath his lashes. In the past, James would have elbowed him. He isn’t sure of the urge, now. The possibility of a lighter moment fades, and Theo tilts his head, runs the palm of one hand over a candle flame idly, making it flicker.  
  
“So why are you here, James?”  
  
The inevitable question. James sidetracks and looks out of the window. The faintest line of light far out on the horizon, over the treetops and roofs of the town. “After I took the coin, I came back and got the copy of my Will from here.” He opens the curtains fully, and leans against the wall. “I’m not entirely sure what I thought I would do with it, but somehow it didn’t seem right to leave it, either. I was still so sensible about some things. Now that things are different I...thought I would return and replace it, but it was an excuse, really. I just wanted to come back. Before.”  
  
Theo has put the candle out, and has to relight it. James watches the wick of the candle flaring back, adding to the glow.  
  
“Have you been happy, James?”  
  
“What?” Theodore is finished with the candle, has put it down, is watching him. He wonders, suddenly, how long he was fixed on it. “How do you mean?”  
  
“Happy.” Theo frowns, awkward. “To me you died eight years ago, and I...don’t know if I can get used to the fact that you were off doing whatever it was but being under this— God, this  _horrible_  curse,  _but_ , if you. If you were at least  _happy_  then it…” he trails off.   
  
“Yes, Theo. I was happy.” He leans his head back against the windowpane. “Even when it was difficult, it was worth it.”  
  
“And it isn’t anymore?”  
  
“Oh, no. No it is.” He looks back out of the window again. Dawn is coming. Definitely. “ _He_  always will be. It’s just that  _I’m_  not quite up to it anymore.”  
  
He makes it to the cemetery before the sun is completely risen. The air is delicate, full of fine light that hangs off the trees and church spire like dew. His hands have been trembling since he left Theodore. They didn’t talk about where he was going. He’d stopped on the path to fumbingly, finally tell Theo that he had always been another brother to James. Theodore had bitten his lip and nodded. “I worked that one out before you did.”  
  
He finds the grave easily. There’s a small tree next to it, with bright red flowers. It really is just a stone set in the floor. His name. His rank. Dates that aren’t entirely correct. ‘Lost in service’.  
  
“That’s one way t’put it,” Jack says, coming up to stand next to him.   
  
He isn’t surprised. Just looks out across the graveyard, to the water, and feels Jack take his hand. He feels tired, and raw.   
  
“How long have you been here?” he asks quietly, looking at Jack. Jack brushes knuckles across his cheek, and kisses him, swallows the tiny cry he gives, the moan that he cannot quash any longer, presses his mouth to James’s hair when James ducks his head and presses it up under Jack’s chin. Breathes in. Breathes.  
  
“Since dawn.”  
  
“Today?”  
  
“Yesterday.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
The sun comes up fully. Jack’s skin is probably already warm. “The Turners are well,” he tells James.  
  
James pulls back. “That’s good.”  
  
“Mm.”   
  
He glances at the stone again, then straightens his hat. “Let’s go.”

 **that is an order**  
  
Jack comes back from the pub with Gibbs to an empty bed and a letter.   
  
It’s a note, really, but it isn’t something he will ever think of as a note from then because that seems too short. It’s a parchment scrap with a hand far more refined than such kinds of correspondence determine, with words that spill over into everything else that he will ever do or be.  
  
  
Oh there’s no  _As you can no doubt tell, I’ve gone_ , no measured but detailed explanation. No  _Don’t follow_ , though that’s implied.   
  
A simple two lines.  
  
  
 _You make me feel immortal.  
  
Please let me have a little mystery.   
  
J_  
  
It is the weight of an anchor tied to Jack’s navel and dropping, but it creases easily as he crumples it in a fist, punches it into the wall. Again and again – until the pulp of it is smudged and dark as his own skin, the fibres of both split and shredded into one. His blood red and sticky and the ink absorbed into his flesh, his shaking hands, his shaking body, hard shudders and the solid fucking  _ache_  of it, oh  _fuck_. Across his fingers and down the back of his hand. He presses his fist to his mouth, knuckles pale, dark, gold; tastes the writing, tastes the ending. Swallows all the letters down.   
  
The only thing left is a sigh. The anchor cord snaps, and he breathes out. A rush like a sail broken free, flick out and whipping into the sky. He has enough to give one heavy breath in and out. It’s a relief and it’s a burden.  
  
When Maria comes to find him, he is sitting on the floor, back against the bed frame. She stands in the doorway for a time, while he looks at her feet, brown as the floor, and she looks at the top of his head and the blood on his fist and the empty, empty room. She leaves him with a kiss in his hair, which is more than James left him. But he understands. That’s the worst part, really. That he understands – that he even would have done the same. They are so very much the same.   
  
It goes against the grain to let him go, to leave him be. But it went against the grain to ever even kiss the man, let alone follow him or trust him. To love him.  
  
Jack wipes his mouth, licks his fingers, smoothes his knuckles and the papery pulp until it is flat. He folds it into four and tucks it into his sash.   
  
He isn’t one to obey orders.   
  
This one, he will.  
  
He won’t look, he won’t ask, he’ll let James die as he wants to. Let him alone to do it. Jack can hold fast. He knows Maria will help him with it. When the people of the village tell the tale of the white sailor who came to stay, he won’t have faded into nothing, died hacking blood, bed ridden – he’ll have disappeared with no trace, and that’s better. Jack will have found nothing but a wet footprint on the floor, crystal salt on the red flowers over the door of the house.   
  
James will have transformed into water.   
  
He’ll have been accepted back into the sea.  
  
James has asked for a better story. Here is the one Jack can give him.

 

 **you will accompany (these fine gentlemen)**  
  
“I bet Antusha still tells stories about you when she’s eighty four.”  
  
“She better had.”  
  
Jack chuckles. It’s as close to small talk as they have ever got, and still doesn’t even fit the bill, because it’s weighted, and heavy.   
  
The cave is the same, which is ridiculous. Dark, dank, and silent. The chest is still there, the blood money – the blood.   
  
They put the coin back together. James thinks it should drop like a stone; it should  _thud_. It simply clinks into the chest with all the others, just slips and settles – throws another chink of light up onto the crags of the ceiling. There is no thunder clap, no rush, no collapse. James looks at it, and breathes in, and coughs.  
  
“Right. That’s...that.”   
  
Jack is staring at him, eyes like dark, dark pools.  
  
As Jack unties the boat he has to sit down for a second, but it’s merely the return of his body. All the little heart beats, all the scars, the bones. Unusual to feel his old body; an  _older_  body, now. Then rowing back from the cave something fails, something... _crumbles_ , and Jack catches him across his knees with a cry of “Not already—!” It’s an animal sound, a moan. The depth of whale song on empty waters.  
  
“It’s just— a moment.” James coughs, and has to fight to get his breath—he has to  _fight_. “Just a moment.” The feel of Jack’s sinewy bicep as he soothes it with his fingers, his head on Jack’s shoulder, Jack’s face silhouetted against the black sky filled with stars. All this space and clear sound. It’s powerful, the understanding of exactly what is happening, but not something he can explain. What feels like the water in his lungs turning to sand, heavy and grating at his ribcage.  
  
They manage to make love when they get back to the  _Morglay_ , though it’s clumsy, clumsier than any drunken mess they’ve had before, any moonlight accident – but James doesn’t care because he feels every bump, every time his lungs burn, every time Jack digs his nails in and takes great gulping breaths of air against his skin with his face pressed into his neck. It’s hot and painful and it  _burns_. They’ve both got rougher fingers and skinnier thighs, crushed throats, not enough time to get breath and look. James wants to roll and sit on top as well as be underneath, be crushed and held and surrounded – Jack cannot be gentle enough because they both know what will happen and his feelings are too fierce and James  _doesn’t care_. He puts his forehead to Jack’s and takes what he can, with thanks to the god(s), thank god.  
  
When they’re finished he thinks he’s cracked a rib with holding back: so many little cries, too much movement. Too much of everything. By the time the sun is up he’s definitely broken one with coughing. Those old, racking noises. He’d almost forgotten them.   
  
He always decided never to let them be the last thing he heard.  
  
He lets Jack help him dress, but doesn’t let him bring the pistol. Call him stubborn, but this is the life he’s had by choosing not to let anything kill him. He doesn’t regret the decision, not even now. He will die as himself, because he must. Not a sack of bones, not cursed by anything. No man, no god, no illness.  
  
Before, he expected the only choice he’d have a chance to make about his death would be to go down with his ship.   
  
It’s the best he can choose now.   
  
The wood of the deck is just warming up under barefoot as they head out together, towards the main mast. Jack moves like a bird behind him; silent, feather touches to his arms, to the base of his spine. Steps in front and to the side – not quite supporting but enough. Enough that James knows he is uncomfortable, that nothing in him will let him be still and accepting, but enough because he is not trying to guide James any other way.  
  
It’s not so much sitting down as stiffly attempting to, but they both let it slide. James spreads his legs out along the deck and curves his shoulders back against the mast. Jack sits next to him, a little further round. Their shoulders meet, then Jack’s hand is warm on his thigh. They almost can’t see each other. Jack had hissed, “I won’t watch.” James had said, “I wouldn’t ask you to.”   
  
He looks out to sea one way, Jack looks the other. He feels so  _ill_ , already. so tired and see through and worn out – and done. In a way it’s fine, it’s familiar, and it isn’t so terrible. Jack is okay and James was lucky. Jack’s hand is unsteady on his thigh, but they both let that slide too. His own hand is level when he cocks the hammer and puts the pistol against his chest, and he thinks, distantly, that he hopes someone would be proud of that. He breathes Jack in, and out, tenses the muscle behind his knees and flexes his toes, and thinks about how ready– and of course that’s when Jack breaks the rules.   
  
For a second James is shocked as Jack turns to see him, though why when he  _knows_  Jack breaks rules every day. This should have been expected.   
  
“Don’t—”  
  
Jack reaches to the neck of James’s shirt and picks apart the white ties with unsteady fingers, presses his lips to the throat revealed and arching back into the mast to help support him.   
  
There are too many motions that they have gone through, too many things redone, undone. This is too like before, too recent, and too much of what can’t be again. There is no cravat now, but the blood will follow. Jack may be hiding his face in James’s throat but there’s nothing shameful in that. James would have done the same. James has always understood that they can be so much the same.   
  
The shot bursting in his chest is  _hot_.Like sparks, like falling too fast and the impact of hitting the water all at the same time. Jack going backwards over the battlements. Puncturing the surface and the splash it threw up against the rocks.   
  
Jack moans and makes fists in his shirt material and opens his mouth against James’s throat, his adam’s apple – it’s wet, it’s warm. Gush, salt, spill. James’s thoughts tip sideways with no warning to the memory of blood in the sea when he stepped into coral, once – the reason for the scars on the back of his right calf, the shock of razor pain and the bloom of red rolling out through the water as it now spreads easily through his lungs.   
  
Jack is trying to say something, and he should know by now he’s awful with talking when he should be quiet – James almost laughs, drops the gun and covers Jack’s mouth. He’s careful to use the other hand. He doesn’t want Jack to remember him tasting of metal. It was that way with the illness, and it was that way with the coin. He still hears “ _James_ ” but shushes him, then pushes his fingers into Jack’s hair. Beads, coins, memories. He twists and grips. (Something fails, something  _crumbles_ —) Silver, gold, bronze and red and blue. Colours fail, colours burn. His treasure. He’s treasure. (He feels a tightening and a spill and) James could be a pirate and Jack could be a  
  
(ending)  
  
king.

 

 

 

  
**bring me that horizon**  
Fire is the only real ending Jack believes in. It’s the product of a life on water; it’s the product of years of watching the sun blaze up and burn down and having that dictate many of his decisions. His directions, his choices. The way light looks on someone’s mouth has led him down more than one stupid path. But none he regrets.

 

He takes out James’s earring and pierces his own ear with it, and knots the chain with his emerald ring on it round James’s neck in return.

 

He takes off his emerald ring and leaves it on the bed, puts the earring most like the one James wore on his finger instead.

  
  
  
James’s eyes are already closed. He’s glad not to have to touch them.

He had meant to stay, to  _stay_  and it hurts now not to be able to.  
  
But he is glad not to have had to watch James’s eyes close.

 

When he’s done, he sets fire to

  
  
the bed in the cabin first 

the bed in the house first,

 

because it makes most sense, because it’s the place that a sailor must fear fire in the most. To die sleeping, indoors. He understands not wanting to. He thinks instead of the water. Open, shifting sea. A place to lose yourself.

He goes down

  
  
to the edge of the ship and jumps into the rowboat

to the beach and climbs into a rowboat of Benito's

 

and sits, very still. He watches the flames whip through

  
the deck and the rigging and the mast, where James’s body sits still, until it's all engulfed and the sails are burning, the hull collapsing inward and water rushing in.

 

the house, until they burst through the windows, engulfs the flowers over the door, the stone, until the roof collapses and the walls are starting to crumble.

 

 

Then he rows away.

 

 

* * *

 

 

**is there any truth to the stories**

“So, that tale.”

“…I’m sorry?”

Jack made a noise of frustration, digging his fingers into the sand. “The one I was telling you about, y’know. The one we’re in: the story o’  _Captain Jack Sparrow_  and his daring exploits on the ocean, an’ the upstandin’, gallant man who’s tryin’ t’stop him.”

James turned around to stare at him, realising what he meant. Jack was picking up the threads of that conversation they had once as though it were twenty seconds before, not well over a year as they sit at the end of a jetty in an entirely different place. Difference between them. And other things.

A wave splashed up over his toes as he was distracted and made him flinch in surprise, though it wasn’t unpleasant, and Jack laughed. “Right. Yes?”

Jack nodded, reaching down to flick his fingers through the water, cup the arch of James’s foot and sit up again, all with the sudden ease of a man used to doing three things at once. “I did expect a bit of romance in mine somewhere. Fer obvious reasons. Y’know.” He grinned, in that magpie way of his that generally led to something lewd. If they weren’t there already.

James raised an eyebrow. “Of course.”

“Goes without sayin’. But. Thing is.” Jack tipped his head to one side. “Thing is I never thought I’d have one of those love stories. Not a proper one. Plenty of action, aye, but not this sorta. Romance.” 

The tide was coming in so fast that James was now ankle deep in the water. He would probably have been happy to sit and drown, with Jack’s eyes on him. He smiled, tucked his hair behind his ears when the wind blew it loose and nodded.

“No,” he said, “I would not have predicted that for myself either.”

Jack hooked an ankle around his. The sea sucked and swilled over their feet, rising up around their calves, like it was breathing. In, and out. Like it was talking, telling them thousand year old stories. 

Telling them old tales, and new.

  

* * *

 

_this is the end._

_this story’s old but it goes on and on_

_ until we disappear _

_ [Play Crack The Sky - Brand New] _


End file.
